I loved launchCAST radio. I haven't been able to use it in a year or so because it's Windows only (even though you listen to it through a browser). It was Yahoo!'s personalized internet radio. It played you songs based on how you rated other songs/artists. It was brilliant. It was like my awesome music friend who would tell me about great bands. launchCAST is solely responsible for introducing me to some of my favorite bands:
Well today Yahoo! announced they are killing off the service. Awesome. Their blog post talks about how they're transferring all their pre-programmed and auto-populated stations they used to offered to CBS Radio, but that in my opinion wasn't a very interesting part of the service. The killer feature was the ratings and recommendations (the personalized radio) which they say "was never a money maker" even though they limited it to Windows Users using Internet Explorer and never tried to make it any better or any more accessible to users. Over the years I have rated 752 Artists, 755 Albums, and 2,288 Songs on the service. The worst part about putting all that time and effort into rating is that there was no way to export those ratings for use elsewhere (like iTunes or last.fm). Even their own Music Player which let you write plug-ins didn't give you access to the ratings because they considered it a proprietary, differentiating feature they didn't want people to have access too. Now they are simply deleting the data for good. So I'm sad to see the service go. It introduced me to a lot of great bands. It's just to bad it is being killed off in a manner that leaves it's most loyal users with nothing. Labels: music, technology
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