I’ll have to admit that as much as I tend to live and breathe computers, I’ve never really been into downloading music or even listening to streaming music. However, recently, I’ve been fascinated with the free Yahoo LAUNCHcast service. I’ve been listening to music streaming from my custom LAUNCHcast radio station while I work. I’ve even been looking up and playing free music videos of some of my favorite songs. I’ve become a free music junkie.
So what hooked me on LAUNCHcast? I visited the LAUNCHcast site because of a banner ad for free music videos. I was impressed by the large selection and variety of free music videos. I then noticed the free streaming radio function, and quickly found out that they offered a very cool custom radio station feature.
You select some of your favorite artists and songs from those artists are played. As the songs are playing you can indicate how much you like them with a single click. The personalized streaming radio station occasionally plays songs that other fans of your chosen artists like. When you rate any of these highly, your list expands to include music from those artists as well. As patterns of what music you like emerge, other similar selections are also periodically presented. If something comes up you don’t like, you can choose to never hear it again.
This feature of LAUNCHcast is brilliantly designed and executed. This is how an interactive Internet service should work. The fact that you can use it for free puts the icing on the cake. Of course, LAUNCHcast is a commercial venture and Yahoo hopes you will buy the albums you hear from them or join the enhanced and "commercial free" paid version of the service.
In a nutshell, here are the things I like about the LAUNCHcast service:
- It’s free to use as long as you like.
- The personal radio station makes it effortless to find and listen to the music you like best.
- The sound quality is very good, the bandwidth usage is nominal for a broadband connection and should be bearable for a good dialup, and the computer resource usage is low.
There are a few things I don’t like about the service, but none of them are overly serious:
- LAUNCHcast doesn’t work with current Mozilla based browsers. If you are a Mozilla or Firefox user, you will have to fire up Internet Explorer.
- In the music video area, they have not normalized the song volumes. You have to crank the volume up to hear some songs and then you get blasted out on the next song or commercial.
- Although overall, the ad rate is low, the player will stop after a number of hours of playing and ask if you want to upgrade to the paid version or keep using the free version.
LAUNCHcast is definitely worth trying if you like music at all. To use all the free features you will need a Yahoo account, which is free and painless, if you don’t already have one.
Please note that if you use this or any streaming service at work, make sure to check to see that it is not against your company’s Internet usage policy. Also check that the extra bandwidth usage will not get you in trouble with the IT department. Be sure to turn off streaming when you are not at your desk – 24x7 steaming of music and or video will not be appreciated by the IT department.
