Intelligent Interactive
Internet Radio
Amazing personalized music services that send you
customized music streams to uniquely suit your taste
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The old concept of 'one
size fits all'
broadcasting
of music to as large a group of people has been totally
turned around. Now you can have your own unique music
station
narrowcasted
directly to you.
Part
one of a three part series on intelligent interactive
internet radio services;
see also :
1. An Introduction to
intelligent interactive internet radio service
2. Creating your own
personalized music streams
3. Specific services reviewed
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Even if you have an iPod full
of thousands of songs, it is still a hassle to pick and choose
each song you want to listen to, and to change tracks or albums
at the end of each selection.
Plus there is something nice
about having someone else choose the music for you - sometimes
you get unexpected 'bonus' surprises - music you like but had
forgotten about, or music you hadn't heard before.
But until now, listening to
someone else's programming has always been hit and miss -
sometimes you get good tracks, and sometimes bad. Plus
maybe you also have to accept advertising and other
interruptions.
Now there's a wonderful new
alternative. Just like Amazon 'knows' the sort of things
you might like based on your past purchases, these intelligent
interactive internet 'radio stations' know what you like and
play only the music you want to hear.
Intelligent Interactive
Internet Music
An evolution from broadcasting
to narrowcasting
Back in the 'good old days'
of radio, stations would design their programming to be as
generically appealing to as many people as possible. As
the number of radio stations grew, each station became more
segmented in the audience it chose to target, but it still
wished to be broadly inclusionary. Stations
needed as large an audience as possible to survive.
The thought of a different
station for every listener was of course a completely impossible
concept.
But now, with the marvel of
the internet and the enormous computing power and storage that
is so wonderfully affordable, it has become feasible to offer
unique customized and automated personalized music 'narrowcasts' to each individual
listener. When done well, this revolutionizes the
convenience and pleasure of listening to music.
What and how they work
These new services provide
you with a wide selection of music that will play automatically
through your computer, or through various other devices such as
the Logitech Squeezebox and Sonos music players, some
stand-alone 'internet radio players' such as the Livio, and even
through many modern cell phones such as the
iPhone and iPod
Touch.
This means you can enjoy
their music pretty much anywhere, the same as with regular or
satellite radio, and the same as with an MP3 player that has a
collection of music stored on it.
The key component of these
new music services is that they learn what you like to listen
to, and adapt the music they send to uniquely match your
preferences and tastes.
These are not services that
sell you music for you to download. They simply send you
music to listen to, like a regular radio station.
Sometimes they are free, and
sometimes their basic service is free but if you want more
flexibility you need to pay extra. Some have occasional
advertisements on their streams. Monthly fees for
upgraded services are seldom very expensive.
How these Music Stations Know
What to Play
There are two parts to how
this works. The first part is being able to categorize
music in an accurate and standardized manner, the second part is
being able to create a profile of your preferences that can be
used to create a template to select music from the collection of
categorized music.
Categorizing Music
The most definitive of the
music categorization undertakings is coordinated by Pandora.
Their 'Music Genome Project' analyzes pieces of music, rating
each piece on several hundred different attributes, so as to come up
with some type of abstract and 'scientific' description of the piece of music.
Some of the scales include features such as (chosen at random
from the huge list available) :
and so on. A typical
song might be scored on as many as 150 or more of these
attributes; more complicated music might be scored on 300 or
more, and in total there are over 500 attributes available to
rate each piece.
Last.fm works on a different
basis. It looks at all the music you have on your computer
and considers that as being music you like, and also keeps track
of the frequency with which you play your music, assuming you
play music you like most more than you play music you don't like
so much. It also looks at the type of music that other
people who like the music you like, also like.
As such, Last.fm doesn't
need to understand what each piece of music is, merely the links
between one piece of music and related pieces of music.
This is a much easier and more automated methodology - it takes
Pandora's analysts something like 20 - 30 minutes to analyze a
single short song.
Understanding Your Preferences
When you first create your
own 'music station' you can specify the type of music you want
to be featured, both in terms of general genre, or more
specifically in terms of particular groups or artists, or even
more precisely by naming specific songs you want to hear.
After you have provided some
information, the service starts to send you music that contains
elements that match the elements in the types of music you have
specified.
Fine-tuning Your Preferences
Once the music service
starts sending you music, you typically then have the ability to
rate each piece of music they send to you. You usually
have three choices - do nothing (which implies that the choice
of music is satisfactory), tell the service you don't like that
piece of music, or tell the service that you particularly do
like the piece of music.
This helps the service to
continue to refine its understanding of you and the music you
like. Plus it simply helps it to know what exact pieces of
music never to send to you, and what exact pieces of music to
send more frequently to you.
The more you listen and the
more you provide feedback, the closer a match of music you'll
get.
NOTE : See the
second part of this series for a more detailed discussion of
how you 'program' your
own music stations.
Saving Yourself Hassle and
Bother
Okay, so even if you have a
huge amount of music that you've stored on an MP3 player, all of
which can be accessed via only a few quick and easy keystrokes,
that's solving only half the problem.
The other problem is
choosing what music to listen to. If you're like me,
you'll sometimes gaze unseeingly at the huge long lists of
albums on your MP3 player, unable to decide which one to play.
Sometimes it is nice to have someone decide for you what you
will hear.
That is the great
convenience of using one of these intelligent and interactive
music streaming services. They sort of 'read your mind'
and with uncanny precision, send you music you like, without you
having to bother to choose it yourself.
And any time they make a bad
choice, you can easily correct them, meaning as the program
learns more and more about you, it gets better and better at
giving you what you want.
What Can You Play the Music On
and How
The music is sent to you
over the internet, so you will need either an internet
connection or a cell phone that has wireless data service on it.
If you are using a regular
internet connection into your house (or office, etc), there are
a range of devices that will either work through a home Wi-Fi
network or via a wired connection. And, of course, your
computer is an obvious first choice.
Because the player should
ideally be able to interact with the music service, not every
'internet radio' player can support these intelligent music
services. You need to be able to log in to the service, to
choose from the different music stations you may have created,
and to be able to, on an ongoing and convenient basis, skip
tracks you don't want to hear and give 'I like/I don't like'
ratings to music you want to hear more or less of in the future.
Three other products that
you can use to get the music off the internet and into your
sound system are :
Logitech Squeezebox
The
Logitech Squeezebox
family is a range of equipment, some of which is detailed and
reviewed already on our site (click link). They have
freestanding players that will both get your music from the
internet and then play it through built in speakers, and also
receivers that don't have speakers, but which output a signal to
feed into a stereo or a/v system for amplification and playing
through that system's speakers.
The equipment is extremely
versatile, easy to set up and use, and affordable.
Sonos
The
Sonos music system is similar
to the Logitech, and in some ways more sophisticated while
perhaps not quite so open ended. It also gives you a
choice of complete systems all the way to speakers or just
receivers that then play through your existing sound systems.
Sonos systems are
beautifully designed, but are considerably more expensive than
the Logitech systems.
Livio Radio
The
Livio internet radio looks a lot
like a regular radio, and allows you to play internet radio
stations plus also Pandora, either through its built in speaker
or via an audio output through other external stereo systems.
Although very much simpler
than the Logitech and Sonos systems, it is not very much
cheaper. So many people will probably choose a Logitech
unit rather than the Livio radio.
Your Cell Phone or iPod Touch
Some of the intelligent
music streaming services now offer various ways to send their
streams to your cell phone if it is one of the more fully
featured phones that comes with data service and which supports
extra programs being added to it.
The most obvious of these
phones is of course the marvelous iPhone, and its related
product, the iPod Touch.
When sending music to your
phone you can either listen to it through headphones or send the
music on to some sort of external speaker or stereo system.
How Much Do These Services Cost
Most of these internet radio
providers offer two levels of service. One level is free,
but there may be some restrictions on how flexible the service
is or how many hours a month you can listen to it, or it might
include advertisements, and the other level costs you a monthly
fee.
Being as how the music
services have to pay the music copyright owners a fee for every
song you listen to, there clearly needs to be some way for them
to earn some money in return.
Monthly fees are seldom very
much and typically about $3 - indeed, Pandora has a 99c/month
fee in addition to free service and a more pricey full featured
service.
Part
one of a three part series on intelligent interactive
internet radio services;
see also :
1. An Introduction to
intelligent interactive internet radio service
2. Creating your own
personalized music streams
3. Specific services reviewed
FTC Mandatory Disclosure : I
was not given any of the products written about on this page by
their manufacturers. I have not been paid money to write this
article.
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Originally published
23 October 2009, last update
21 Jul 2020
You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer.
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