Yahoo: music and authenticity

There have been a couple of interesting postings in the last week on the Yahoo! Music Blog — almost as interesting for their candid, open style as for their content. First, Ian C Rogers outlines the new features of the Yahoo! Music Engine. Ian’s blog post seems to take the place of a corporate press […]

Online radio revisited and updated

It’s almost two years since I argued here that online radio is the model for listening to music in the future. I know there aren’t many who mark this anniversary as a national holiday, but to me it felt like a point where several things clicked into place in my mind. There’s a fascinating article […]

Active and passive music listening

There’s a passage near the beginning of David Toop’s Haunted Weather (reviewed here) where he writes, “trying to listen to everything has almost destroyed my desire to listen to anything”. In a column in January’s issue of Word magazine, Paul Du Noyer wrote about the ubiquity of music and entertainment being almost totalitarian, and referred […]

Peer-to-peer recommendations coming to mobile

Proving that convergence is rapidly becoming a fait accompli, news of personalised radio on mobiles is supplemented by peer-to-peer recommendations on mobile devices, currently in prototype development through the Push!Music project in Gothenburg. The site encourages you to Imagine that you have a mobile device that can store and play back music files, for example […]

Personalised radio moves to mobile

An unavoidable usability limitation of mobile phones is that you can’t create a small, multi-purpose user interface that is well-suited to all the tasks asked of it: text entry, information browsing, taking photographs, playing games and even making calls. That’s why a phone will never have the ease of use for music applications that the […]

Playlist portability: comparative review

One thing leads to another and, when we saw Barb Jungr play just before Christmas, I got a copy of her Every Grain of Sand album of Bob Dylan covers, which triggered another bout of my recurrent mania for these cover versions. I went through all my old covers albums again, ripped my favourite versions […]

Does music have a genome?

Alongside the Last.FM model of personalised online radio (which I covered at some length and have cited in several other posts), Pandora provides an alternative based on different technology and classifications: We take your input (artists, songs) and feedback (“I like this”, “I don’t like this”) and use the Music Genome Project™ to create stations […]