This is another example of a streaming music service that incorporates a "radio" feature. The user queues up one or more tracks and turns on the radio feature. The songs that were queued up act as a "seed" for a new radio station. As the end of the playlist is reached, a new song that is considered (by whatever algorithm Grooveshark uses) to be broadly similar to the seed tracks is queued up. So, as the user listens to the station, new songs are continually added. The user can also mark any new track in the queue with a "like" or "dislike". Any "liked" track is considered to be one of the seeds for future tracks, while any "disliked" track will act as a negative seed. That is, the algorithm will try to avoid adding new songs that are similar to the disliked tracks. In this way, the user dynamically created and tweaks a custom radio station.
An unrelated but interesting detail about Grooveshark is that their music library is based on user uploads, a bit (but not quite) like YouTube. Users can upload audio to the online music library, where it becomes searchable and listenable by all other Grooveshark users.
I feel like Grooveshark is seriously underrated compared to Spotify, especially because of this radio functionality that you mention.
ReplyDeleteIf you get tired of making your own playlists you can just press the grooveshark radio-button and grooveshark will make one and stream music based upon your previous listenings and likes/dislikes.
Too bad a lawsuit made apple retract the grooveshark app from the app store..
But you also have to remember that Spotify is the legal way of listening to music peer-to-peer, while Grooveshark is not. Just saying =) With laws comes restrictions (and yes, I have tried Grooveshark, it works pretty great!)
ReplyDelete/Sara Cecilia