We, your humble Radio Survivors, are unabashed fans of broadcast radio. That much should be clear to anyone who peruses our site. But we hope that readers also see that we don’t limit ourselves to the AM, FM and shortwave dials. It’s vitally important to recognize that every time a new audio distribution technology comes […]
Rdio is a year-old entrant into the online music streaming marketplace, offering a Spotify-like experience that allows listeners to choose the exact artist, albums and songs they want to hear. Founded by the creators of Skype, Rdio previously had been a subscription-only service with only a seven-day free trial period. On Thursday the company announced […]
I’m continuing to cultivate my turntable.fm addiction by experimenting with various extensions of the music social networking application for the Chrome browser. No doubt there are many. So far I’ve found four that I enjoy. First a quick refresher. The way turntable.fm works is that you join a room as either a listener or a […]
Spotify is an online streaming music service that has been available in parts of Europe since 2008. It differentiates itself from popular US music services like Pandora and last.fm by permitting users to actually select the specific artists and songs to hear, rather than only relying upon an algorithm to choose music similar to a […]
Those graphics loving geeks over at Last.fm are at it again. Remember the flower power experiment? Now Last.fm staffer Andrew Clegg describes how he’s grabbed a pile of the online music service’s user tags and combined them with data from the Echo Nest’s million song dataset. Then he brought the whole goulash over to the […]
Last.fm is doing another one of their fun (if a bit perplexing) audio visual experiments. This one involves tracking the complexity of a song’s rhythm, harmony, and timber, then translating that variability into a flower-like image. The thicker the respective color petal (green=harmony; red=rhythm; blue=tambor), the more variability. As so: The image to the left […]
In a textbook example of the abusive power of a near-monopoly, the ‘net was set ablaze yesterday upon the news that major internet backbone provider and content distribution network (CDN) company Level 3 called out cable-modem internet service provide Comcast for demanding additional fees for delivering video and other content to Comcast customers. Comcast’s demands […]
Last.fm staff are a creative and unpredictable bunch. When the online radio service’s interns aren’t categorizing last.fm tunes by age and gender popularity, their database programmers deploy regular expression scripts to dive into the server’s postgreSQL database and dig up every band named with the same word twice. As in “The The,” “Talk Talk,” “Duran […]
Joachim Van Herwegen, an intern at Last.fm, recently decided to compile a number of plots of musical preferences based on listener ages and genders. The results are quite fascinating! Herwegen’s first plot depicts the most common artists as a function of age (x-axis) and gender (y-axis). A quick glance will tell you that most users […]
Today Apple CEO Steve Jobs made his now-annual announcement for the new version of the company’s top product. While there were several surprises in store, like the addition of video conferencing and HD video recording, there wasn’t anything unexpected for radio enthusiasts. Jobs confirmed the debut of multitasking with the new version 4 of the […]
