LaunchCast: The completely personalized radio station…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I discovered LaunchCast radio from The Long Tail (which is very worth reading). It’s a streaming radio service — with a twist. You create your own radio station, based on your preferences, which is then streamed to you personally. You set meta-goals by working with a list of genres, sub-genres, even specifying individual artists. Then, as ‘your’ station is playing, you can rate, rave about or eliminate particular songs as they are playing. If something plays that you just have to own, you can buy it through the interface.

This sounds like a lot of work, but mainly you’re just listening to the radio while you work. The difference is, it’s a radio station that is progressively more to your taste, and progressively less annoying. I have a love/hate relationship with XM radio in my car. Even so, I almost never listen to broadcast radio, because, for all its faults, XM is still much better. We have a vast collection of music ripped to MP3s, fed by iTunes from my Mac to a stereo in our office. We call this WHFO, and we had thought it was about as good as we were going to get in a radio format. LaunchCast blows all of this away. It starts out pretty good, but even if you do no more than weed out the stuff you hate — motivation abounds — it will get better and better with time.

Give it a try. There’s a free version that you can test-drive for 600 songs a month. The premium product, highly recommended, is $35 a year. I’m a Realtor. I live in my car. If I could have LaunchCast in the car, XM would be hauling its satellites to the junk yard…