Burning Lemons

Reports on the death of radio keep coming out thick and fast. The media has finally started to pick up on services such as Last.fm and Pandora and have begun to use them as their latest excue to declare traditional radio dead and buried.

At least here in The UK I’m not at all willing to describe the situation in that way. At the moment I’m listening to BBC 6Music, I could listen to music from my iTunes library or from Last.fm but have instead chosen to listen to a linear radio station that is not exactly tailored to my taste, why?

Firstly even though I have spent months and months training Last.fm it has still failed to get my musical taste exactly right, this is partly because I listen to a lot of podcasts through iTunes and it is apparently impossible to get it to discount them. Therefore it thinks my top 3 Artists are “Molly Wood, Tom Merritt and Jason Howell” (of Buzz Out Loud from CNET), “BBC Radio 5 Live” and “guardian.co.uk”, while this is true I want Last.fm to find music for me, not podcasts.

iTunes on the other hand is great but it totally fails to find new music for me. While the store does have a recommendation system built in it basically sucks coming up with the most obvious suggestions (You bought a Coldplay song a year ago, how about Violet Hill) or totally misses the mark (You Bought Flathead - The Fratellis, How about Toxic - Britney Spears, I’m not making this one up)

So radio still seems (to me) to be the way forward as well as music there is a huge variaty of high quality speech on BBC Radio 4 and the underlistened BBC World Service and the totally underated BBC Radio 5 Live.