My daily surfing routine brought me to this link. At Wil Wheaton’s site, of all places. Now this is a concept! Just type in the name of a band or a song and boom, they start throwing all sorts of shit at you! All similar to the style (I suppose the definition of style is pretty loose) of music that you entered. If you hate a song you can just move on and they will try to find something more suited to your taste.
The type of music that I like doesn’t lend itself to any sort of radio airplay, and I don’t have the time or patience to seek it out on the internet. This little thing makes it a lot easier. Now I sincerely doubt that I will actually subscribe to it, but being that the first ten hours are free I will sure try to find some cool new (no matter how old they are they are still new to me) bands while I am at it.
The service is freakily accurate. I have now listened to ten songs, only once did I actually have to do a WTF and nix the song. Not to mention that about half of the songs that they played are actually somewhere in my CD collection. It puts me in mind of when I started my very first website, which, oddly enough, is still online (if you really want to see it I will email you the link). I put one of those radio stations onto it, this was back when they actually let you select bands that you wanted to be played on the station. The dead link to that web radio station still exists on that website. It turns out that someone (probably Lars Ulrich) got all in a huff about being able to select only certain bands to play, thought it was infringing on copyrights and the such, thus they had to give up on letting you select bands. Those stations still exist, but now you can only select from a genre. What a pile of something.
This Pandora thing has already given me the names of a few bands that I would like to sample additional music from. The first was The Haunted. Man, they do some really heavy stuff. There have been a couple that I have yet to find websites for, but it is hard to find this kind of heavy shit on the radio. I just heard, in succession, a song from Death, followed by one from Metallica (Dyer’s Eve, you know, one of the good ones), now it is playing Slayer.
The one major drawback, as I just found out, is that you can only skip a certain number of songs per hour. That means that if it picks something totally inappropriate and you tell them to skip it, you can only do that a certain number of times. I didn’t count how many I actually skipped, there is still only one that I skipped because I just didn’t like it. I was mostly just skipping past the ones that I already have in my CD collection, trying to find stuff that I hadn’t ever heard. If I would have just listened to all of the songs, which I like anyway, mind you, I would probably not have hit that wall.
Wow! Superjoint Ritual sure knows how to kick some ass! I suppose what I call music wouldn’t work for everyone. But they do have that handy feature that lets you search for an artist or title to start with, then, sort of like playing a game of MasterMind, keep trying new songs until they really find the niche that you are into. It’s the best thing since porn sliced bread.
The best part about the whole deal, again, as I just found out, is that the more artists/songs you add to the “station”, the more likely they are to find more stuff that matches your tastes pretty closely. While you may not like the stuff I do, Dew-Scented being the most recent example (that kicks some ass!), I bet they have some more down to earth genres as well. Hell, when I entered Goo Goo Dolls as a new station, I got a bunch of stuff that sounded pretty much like them.
Since I am not a spokesman for the company, and therefore all I get out of this endorsement is the satisfaction of 10 free hours of their weirdly accurate music selections, I am gonna call it a post.
Or not. Boy, that last selection just sounded like a guy taking a really big dump, through a straw or something (meaning he had to poo through an opening the size of a straw, and tried to ‘sing’ while he was doing it), to hear his voice. Of course, once I said I hated that one it was followed immediately by some Pantera. They know me. Much in the same way that astrologists can say that, since you are a Libra, the sun will rise in the morning and go down at night, now that is some freakily accurate insight.
Seriously though. They played only two songs that I simply didn’t like in a stretch of two hours. There is no way you would get such results from a radio station. Also, they never repeated a song, try getting that from your local radio station. It is a great idea, though horribly over-priced, and I would really like to see it catch on. Perhaps get some legs