#“My Next Radio ain’t a Radio”
I did a bit of messing this week on Turntable.fm followed by Google Music on my phone and I've been doing some mulling.
Google Music has been uploading my music collection to the cloud for a week. Probably another week to go. The genius bit is that the new music player on Android then shows all of your music. If a song is not on your phone and you try to play it, it'll start streaming it. You choose if you only want to do that on Wifi or 3G too.
So this morning I drove up to collect Oisn from soccer and, as usual, had my HTC Desire paired by Bluetooth to my Lidl car stereo. Then I picked a Lou Reed song that wasn't on the phone and Google Music streamed it perfectly over 3G. Very impressed. Obviously will be rubbish in rural West Cork with the poor mobile coverage and I need to watch my data usage. But as a concept I love it.
Then you have Turntable.fm. A series of "rooms" dedicated to different types of music with a bunch of DJ slots available in each one. You can grab a slot and upload your music into your queue. The system then round-robin plays each DJs songs and those listening in the room can vote it up or down. Enough "Lames" and your song gets skipped. @walter described it as crack and he is 100% right. It is as close to a perfect game-play driven web-app as you can get. I've been in and out to the 80s rooms non-stop for days.I think my DJ name will be Transit van Driver.
I've never been much of a radio person. I'll take wall-to-wall music any day over some fools prattling-on or god-awful phone-ins. The only talk radio I ever liked was Howard Stern in SV in 1996. And that was just for laughs. But of course the problem with music radio is the lowest common denominator playlists. So I guess most of us end up listening to our own music on our own phones/ipods. But then that leads to stagnation of tastes as you are not exposed to new stuff.
Google thinks (as always) the answer is an algorithm. They have Instant Mix in Google Music. "Here are more songs like the one you arelisteningto". Yawn, last.fm sorted that out years ago.
Then Gordon Murray (@murrion) nailed it "Wonder if turntable.fm could stream to it".
Imagine the music you listen to in your car is what a bunch of different people in specific rooms on turntable.fm are playing, streamed to your phone over 3G and then to your dumb head-unit? Bluetooth based thumbs-up/thumbs-down and Room-Switcher for changing songs.
Jam in some ads or a subscription service and I've got My Next Radio.