Musicovery

Last semester one of my professors talked a lot about online radio sites, and I'm a little surprised he never mentioned one that I stumbled across today. The ads on Pandora are starting to drive me insane, and I frequently run into trouble finding what I'm looking for on Grooveshark, so I decided it was time to give something new a try.

Musicovery approaches online radio from a different perspective. You choose typical music "genres" the way you do on most sites (Classical, Rock, Folk, Soundtrack, Jazz, etc.), but to launch a radio playlist, you indicate your mood (or the mood of music you are looking for) on a simple graph: a Dark to Positive continuum on the x-axis, and Calm to Energetic on the y-axis.

Many users may be initially deceived by its simplistic appearance, but it's actually quite an elegant design and, at least for me, it seems to work impressively well. At anytime you can readjust your position on the grid and watch the upcoming songs on your playlist adapt to your new mood. A few other cool attributes of the site include: a small timeline will indicates the era of the song that's currently playing, an alternative page allows you to select music from a "Dance graph" (I haven't played around with that one yet), and there's also a playlist for newly added songs to the site's database. They are in the process of compiling a cool looking popularity chart of songs too, where each song is ranked based on users tagging favorites or tracks they dislike. At this point I don't think Musicovery has the variety or volume of something like Pandora, but it's definitely still worth a look!