umasstpt12:

As much as I enjoy Pandora, I’ll be honest, sometimes they pick songs that are those over-played crappy ones that I’ve heard on the regular radio 100 times. Occasionally, Pandora will pick an artist that I’ve never heard of, and while that’s cool, that usually only happens when I’m listening to Indie music (which is a genre full of unheard of artists to begin with). I’ve been told by a couple that they prefer Last FM for it’s music selection. While I do have a profile there, I still prefer Pandora because of a interface that I’m use to and seems relatively easier to use compared to Last FM.

Anyways, I was Stumbling around today and came across this site called uWall. If you want to listen to only one artist, especially an artist who’s music you own little or none, it’s awesome. Looking at it for a couple seconds, it basically pulls links of Youtube videos of songs from the artist and puts them into one player. Of course, the downfall is that the playlist/shuffle feature isn’t that good. You can hit shuffle, but the music it shuffles is for you isn’t as specific as what Pandora will play for you (example, you’ll be listening to Stairway to Heaven one second, and the next you’ll be listening to Dave Matthews Band). To fix this, you can create your own playlist, but then the downside to this is that you need to spend time making it and there’s no “suprises” in what songs are coming. Looking at it from the legal ends, this site is also probably technically illegal; while Pandora pays artists the rights to play their music, this site is using videos from Youtube, which are very often not endorsed or uploaded by the artists. Oh, and this also means there are no ads, another downfall to Pandora. 

Regardless, this is a great website from the little I’ve played around with it. I can only guess that I may begin to end up spending more time on this site than Pandora for my internet radio. 

I love the interface of this site, and how it compiles pics of different artists based on what genre you select in the top left corner (IE clicking on the Indie genre will display a collage of different pics of artists, and simply clicking on an artist will compile a playlist of youtube uploads for that artist). If you want to instantly listen to a bunch of music by one artist, this is definitely a kick ass radio website. 

Last.fm has some awesome features that make it well worth taking the time to get acquainted with. Essentially what it does is it takes your existing itunes library and analyzes the shit out of it. After creating a profile, the website basically syncs with your itunes and from there you can easily keep track of your most played artists, how often you listen to different artists, new additions to your library, and so on. Downloading the “Scrobbler” will allow the site to keep track of the music you play on your computer as well as your ipod. (Every time you plug your ipod into your computer it scrobbles all of the plays on it since the last time you plugged it in). The interface of the scrobbler displays recommendations for every artist your itunes is currently playing, based on what other last.fm users are listening to, and if you are on another computer with internet access, you can even use the website to create radio style playlists with only music from your library, or ones based on artists you really dig. 

(Source: davefoth)