Internet radio

Internet radio has come of age. For my birthday this year I asked for a slacker radio and got one from my parents. I have to admit that it’s a pretty cool toy. I haven’t bothered to subscribe as the advertisements aren’t too burdensome. We just leave the slacker player attached to my stereo and sync it every day (or so). It’s nice to have music playing all the time. It’s usually playing jazz or blues on the weekends and something livelier on weekday afternoons and evenings. Every once in a while Stacie or I run into the room where the stereo is and nix a song (Colby Caillet anyone?). It’s that  interactive feature which is what’s improving Internet radio beyond the broadcast model which I’ve been listening to for years on iTunes or WinAmp (or even FM in my car….imagine that).

Slacker allows you to “favorite” a song or ban it with the touch of a button on the player or on the web player. A favorite will play more often and a banned song will no longer play on that station (like Colby Caillet). Slacker has over 10,000 stations and the possibilities are endless.  Slacker has a good selection of indie stations.  The drawback of Slacker is that it contains audio advertisements inserted into the stations, which you can do away with if you buy a subscription.

Pandora goes even further and allows you to create your own stations.  You start with an artist or a song as a “seed” then using the Music Genome Project your station gets populated with songs.  As songs play you can “like” or “don’t like” a song (it even allows you to “snooze” a song from playing on any of your stations for a month). Eventually you have a highly customized station that plays music you like and doesn’t play music you don’t like. You can share your stations or clone stations from others which then you can customize even further.  Pandora is supported by advertisements, but not via audio inserted into the stations, rather the ads are displayed in the browser player as you listen. Like Slacker there is a subscription if you want to do away with the advertisements. Unfortunately, Pandora does not have a large selection of indie music, but as you rate your songs your stations start to sound less and less like the corporately programmed stations and more and more like what you want to listen to.

Like the slacker device, there are other devices (or this or this) which you can use to subscribe to Internet radio, but the slacker is the only one (currently to my knowledge) with storage which allows it to continue to play music while “offline” or not connected to the internet. Pandora also runs on the Apple iPhone (WiFi only).

There are plenty of other Internet radio stations like Last.fm and AOL Radio (and many many others) some with the interactive features and some without. As more and more people start putting PCs or intelligent devices in their entertainment centers interactive Internet is poised to take off.

I’ve posted my Pandora stations below and may eventually post them in the sidebar of this blog.