Launchcast

I’m always up for new sources of music, and M. turned me onto this broadcasting service that Yahoo maintains called Launchcast. I’ve been listening to it at work mostly, and after some inital scepticism it’s growing on me. Basically, you get a personalized music feed — radio without the DJ. You can start out by selecting genres and sub-genres of music that you want to listen to. And then the hard work begins. Each song that plays, you can give a rating by song, artist, and album. After you start giving ratings, the music starts to shape itself more to your tastes.

Initially I ran into a problem where I started hearing the same few bands over and over. I realized a couple of things — don’t rate any particular thing too highly (i.e. 100) or you’ll start to hear a lot of it. Also, the artists and albums available is richer than one might think at first glance. Launch has a large selection of artists that you can dig through — I forget how I brought it up but there’s an extensive alphabetized list according to genre. Bring up an artist you’re interested in and then rate the albums they have available on Launch.

You’ll need to setup a Yahoo login in order to access Launch, but it was a fairly painless process. There are also a variety of pre-programmed “stations” that you can listen to organized mostly by musical genre. More features are available, but they’re not really worth going into. One additional point that bears noting is that Launch has a huge selection of music videos, probably the biggest I’ve seen online. Not every artist is in there and there are some notable gaps, but after I found obscure videos from Cop Shoot Cop and Swans, I was hooked.