Yesterday I wrote about my last week in radio-synchronicity-nirvana-Zen-whatever. The whole thing was really prompted by Meredith’s post about Yahoo’s Launchcast Radio, which I’ve become quite fond of. Being new to internet radio, its capabilities could be matched or even exceeded by others, but from the little reading I’ve done, the only entities that get close are not big fish and the fact that Yahoo! is a major player on the Internet means that it’s not going to go away any time soon, which is always a concern of mine for net-based services. Here's a relatively recent article about some other major players in the field.

Yahoo! bought Launchcast from Launch Media in 2001. Launch had debuted the service in 1999 and soon after, quite predictably, was being sued by some of the big record companies and the RIAA. Yahoo inherited at least one of those suits and settled it so that it now has to dole out compensation to these companies for use of the music, and that’s probably where a big percentage of my money is going! It doesn’t make me feel all that great that I’m still supporting those guys, but I’d rather be doing it in a progressive way like this than through having to listen to stupid ads on commercial FM radio or by buying overpriced CD’s for the one or two songs I want to hear. What I would love to see are bands going to Yahoo! directly and bypassing these big record companies altogether. If individual bands could get even a fraction of the cut that I’m sure these companies and the RIAA are getting, I’m sure most of them would be thrilled to cut out the middlemen. Maybe if enough artists switched over to this method - even those currently tied to a company but whose contract runs out relatively soon - these companies would wither to nothing. Sure they’d still be keeping their fat cats rich off of the royalties, but those would start declining as the popularity of a lot of the oldies would as a matter of course… Well, one can dream…

Part of the power of Launchcast is in how you are able to customize it to your tastes. The way this is done is by allowing the user to rate all the numerous genres (and many sub-genres) with either a 1-5 star rating or an even more exact 0 to 100 scale. Within each genre or sub-genre, Launchcast also offers a group of a dozen or so artists which you can rate as well, or, you can simply do searches on artists, songs, or album titles, and then rate each of these individually. As well, each time a song comes up on your “player” you can rate the song, artist, and album. Launchcast uses all these ratings to produce a “station” for you. This artificial intelligence then looks at each person who rates a given artist with a high rating, and tries to figure out among all of these “fans,” which other artists are also highly rated so that it can suggest additional music, some of which you might not have had any idea existed. This is all very impressive to me, but perhaps it’s old hat to many of you. It’s one thing to get better quality sound, fewer (or no) commercials, or more choice in terms of genres, but really customizing radio based on a user’s particular tastes and others who share some of those tastes, to me really is taking radio to the next level. That is why I’m currently paying money for this service. It’s a lot less than satellite radio at $4 (or $3 if you commit for year) per month.

There are only a couple of issues that I have with Launchcast that make it less than perfect for me. One is the fact that so far it doesn’t work in different browsers. It’s a little bit shortsighted to only cater to one browser, Internet Explorer in this case, but I’m hopeful that Yahoo! will fix this problem and will be supporting other browsers, Firefox in particular, in the not-too-distant future. Maybe I'm being a little harsh here, since Firefox has only just gotten out of beta. Doing a little more digging, I discovered a stand-alone application that one can use as your “player” instead of IE. While this is a step backwards in some ways – since you will have to download this onto the PC you are using, which sometimes is not possible – it enables me to do away with IE for my listening. Sure it may be using part of IE’s engine for the application, and you can’t launch it from link on the Launchcast site the way you can with the standard player, but it any time I can avoid using IE proper, I will. This app is called LAUNCHcast Desktop Player Application and was created by Mark Edington. As far as I can tell, it’s only available on the Launchcast Yahoo! Group, but it’s freely distributable, so I’ve uploaded it and provide it here for your use.

The other problem for me is that right now Launchcast is not really portable. Ok, so you can listen to it wherever you have a reasonably fast Internet connection, but really you are still chained to a computer, even if it’s just a laptop. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m wondering if Launhcast will work on a portable PocketPC device running IE? With a wifi card in it, one could theoretically take it around and listen to it at a Starbucks or public wifi hotspots, or even over a 3G cellular network on a PocketPC-based smartphone. For the present I’m not sure what can really be done about it. Wifi is becoming more popular with the consumer and more devices and computers are coming equipped with wifi capability. Some city and town governments are looking at providing it for free (Phili has just approved such a plan), but the point is that it’s still very localized. Most hotspots are still only 802.11B, whose range is only a hundred or so feet. 802.11G is a little better but not much, and besides it’s not nearly as popular as B even though G has been out now for a couple of years. 802.11N is the next standard and the first one where we are starting to see really significant range (in the many hundreds of feet) and speed increases. It hasn’t been approved yet, and although there are “pre-N” devices already being sold, there’s no guarantee these will work with the final standard, so most are holding off for now. Still, it’s taken years for a relatively small (considering the overall geography) number of 802.11B hotspots to become available in the U.S. There are even the more advanced wireless protocols “Wimax” and “Mobile-Fi” that offer the promise of considerably larger ranges and speeds even than 802.11N. The range might allow for repeaters to be spaced out as much as current cell towers are to provide a smiliarly complete coverage area. But there are many obstacles to this kind of universal service, including technical, economical, regulatory, etc. For the foreseeable future, we’re stuck. Or are we?

In addition to what I’ve mentioned, Launchcast has some other nifty features like allowing you to view a history of everything you’ve heard on your station. Didn’t get around to rating something you really liked 3 songs ago, just go into your history and get the information about it. You can’t actually play it again on demand, but that is part of what makes Launchcast “radio” as opposed to a just a virtual collection of music that you play at will. That sort of on-demand capability, while desirable in one way, doesn’t get to the heart of one of the key advantages I see with how radio works. When you let someone else choose for you, you are, it’s true, giving up some control of what you listen to at any given time. The amount of control of course depends on what you are listening to, with standard FM radio being at the lower end of the spectrum (although you can at least theoretically choose the genre you want to hear), and a service like Launchcast at the other end. But when you give up some of that control, you can actually gain by being “forced” to listen to music you’ve never heard before. Some assuredly you will never want to listen to again, but others will be great new finds. I’m no longer in high school where classmates would hand me their personally recorded mix tapes, or in a dorm where lots of different people with different musical tastes would introduce me to all kinds of stuff I’d never heard before. And since I don’t listen to much music on the regular radio anymore, this has provided me for the first time in years a way to expand my playlist. In that vein, if you know someone else’s Yahoo! ID that uses Launchcast, you can listen to their station too, and if you share their tastes, you can name them as an “influencer.” Doing so will cause Launchcast to start to introduce into your station some of the music that plays on your influencer(s) stations. I haven’t yet chosen any influencers because I don’t know anyone else personally who uses Launchcast, and I feel like I’m still building my own station with doing all the rating, but I’m sure I will get around to adding some eventually.

With that in mind, I thought I’d provide a link (which will henceforth be in the left column of my Blog if you view it in a web page by its url – twelveblackcodemonkeys.com) to my station. I’m sure it will differ considerably from many of the people reading this, but that’s the fun – you get to listen to things you might not even know existed, or at least get to know someone else’s tastes in a more tangible way. To give you some fair warning, my station combines some alternative rock, jazz, classical, movie soundtracks, and a smidgeon of folk, Latin, world, and classic rock. I would say the bulk is alternative rock, jazz, and classical though.

posted Wednesday, 8 December 2004

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