squidpants

So I was about to write about how much I liked Yahoo’s Launch radio. It’s sort of like the Netscape Radio I talk about sometimes, but you can customize your own station and add bands to a "never play again" list (like Creed and Dashboard Confessional, to use my list), and it’ll also play bands that other people who like your bands recommend. I’ve heard good old stuff and good stuff I’ve never heard before on there, like new Cypress Hill (it’s good, honestly) and other cool songs, like old Gang Starr, new Chemical Brothers, etc, so I was liking it.

The sound quality is not as good as Netscape, and it can take some work to build up a good playlist on your station because you have to surf around other stations and find stuff you like, or you’ll be hearing the same things over and over. And the names of the preprogrammed stations are weird too, like the "Soft Rock" station is actually pretty good, despite the bad name, they played the Cure and John Lennon and other good stuff. And "Alternative" is terrible, it's all those shitty bands like Trapt and Mest and Puddle of Mudd that spell their names wrong. I hit "don’t play again" on the first 5 songs and went somewhere else. You can skip 5 songs an hour too, which is cool.

Unfortunately, there’s a limit on the number of songs you can hear per month, 400, and after 3 days I reached it so I can only hear the preprogrammed channels and not my station. Which sort of sucks, but it’s still a pretty good radio thing. I’d highly recommend it if they didn’t have the limit. But I am thinking of subscribing to the premium version anyway, because I like it a lot, and it gives you better sound quality and no ads or limits and I like being able to put on "My Station" and not have to skip a lot of stuff. You can check out My Station here to give you an idea of what it's like.