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November 19, 2005

ICYG Kicks Ass, And A Future Radio Idea

When I'm working/reading on the computer for an extended time, I'll usually listen to the in-house "hi-q" version of the ICYG stream. A little game I'll sometimes play is to say to myself, "I'll stop listening when a song comes on I don't want to hear." That's getting harder and harder; part of that is that I recently tuned the songpicker algorithm to favor those who are logging listening time. A lot of my submissions come up as a result, but so do many of several other members'.

ICYG is the future of radio.

Speaking of the future of radio, imagine this. You're in your car and you have XM or Sirius (or equivalent). You think of a song you'd like to hear, so you tell the radio. It confirms your selection and the backend service queues it up for play on one of thousands of available jukebox channels and tells your radio. As soon as the current song is done, the radio does a nice auto-fade to the channel your request is queued on, and in a few minutes you're listening to it. After it's done, the channel continues to play related artists' songs, hoping it's piqued your tastes.

Wow, a radio that might actually let a user program it. A lot more fun and easy-to-use than having to carry your music in the car on a long trip. Whaddya think?

Posted by Alex Harden on November 19, 2005 9:19 PM |

Comments

Have you played with Pandora yet?

http://pandora.com/

Posted by: Ross Karchner | November 20, 2005 10:37 AM

I know you generate your play list either in the morning or each hour. I cannot remember exactly. If it is hourly, would it be possible to take input from a webform for artist requests? Make it a member only section of the webpage and before generating a playlist, check for requests. These could accumulate each hour and then be cleared out when the requests are taken while generating the next hour's playlist.

I like your idea for the future of radio. Standard AM and FM radio will continue to die, primarily because of an over abundance of commercials and little if any listener feedback taken into account.

Posted by: Scott | November 20, 2005 11:29 AM

It'll never happen. The whole *point* of commercial radio is for "them" to tell you what you want to listen to, not for you to choose. They'd lose a lot of money if they let us actually use our sense of taste.

Posted by: Citrus | November 20, 2005 10:56 PM

Ross: I'd heard of Pandora and hadn't checked it out since early on. I just looked at it and it seems very cool. Will be checking it out more.

Scott: We can talk privately about the possibility of implementing that feature. I think it could be hacked in to the current implementation.

Citrus: I think the service I described will be delivered within 10 years, and it won't be commercial radio as we know it.

I'm thinking a low-cost alternative to XM/Sirius might be Internet-based stations, delivered to vehicles via mesh Wi-Fi that will start with the Interstates and spread from there. It probably won't be as stable and high-quality an experience as satellite service, but it will further enable the long tail of "radio". If the RIAA wants to make licensing cheaper/easier remains to be seen, but I think the quality of independent music (at least the stuff I've been checking out) is going to continue to increase. That's probably going to be the stuff that drives the long tail.

Posted by: aharden | November 21, 2005 9:22 AM

You can't be 57285 serious?!?

Posted by: Mary Box | August 15, 2006 7:46 PM

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