Music exploration
(flickr tag: music)
One of the things I love about Rhapsody and my Sandisk Sansa is that they make it easy for me to find new music that I might enjoy but would otherwise never know about.
Rhapsody has always had this feature called “Channels” (used to be called “Radio”), which gives you access to essentially a pre-populated playlist for some genre or collection of music (like Pop or ’90s Hits). There are, however, some big ways in which channels differ from playlists:
- The contents of a channel are always updated so you won’t hear the same songs day in and day out (though some will repeat eventually).
- You don’t see the full list of songs for a channel. All you see is the currently playing track and the name of the next track.
- You can skip forward to the next track, but you can’t go back to the previous one (at least not by using the standard player controls).
The imposed limitations may seem like a pain at first, but they quickly make you start thinking of music in a new way. The limitations not only encourage, but actually force exploration of songs that you otherwise would never have known to listen to. You pick a channel you like and all of a sudden your musical horizons are broadened beyond the 20 songs they play on your favorite radio station or the 13 tracks on a CD by an artist you like. Since the playlist is essentially endless, you can just leave the channel playing in the background as you work and listen to all this new, good music.
My favorite channel on Rhapsody is called the Rolling Stone’s Hot List. They play a really good mix of rock, pop, hip-hop, and other genres and I find that I like about 80% of the songs I hear there.
The best part about channels and Rhapsody is the integration with the Sansa mp3 player. The special Rhapsody edition lets you transfer channels right onto the player. This pre-populates the mp3 player with songs you will probably like without you having to search for individual songs and building up a playlist every time you want something different. If you listen to music on-the-go a lot like I do, this totally changes the way you organize your music.
I’m not going to go into how much I like the streaming music service that Rhapsody offers over the iTunes music store and others like it, but that in combination with channels has completely transformed my view of music. I no longer have to worry about where I put the songs I downloaded, about keeping my mp3’s organized in my file system, about thinking of and finding the songs I want to add to a playlist — all that is history. And if that wasn’t good enough, I now also have access to a much broader range of music.
Rhapsody’s innovative approach has really opened up the gates of music exploration. I hope other music providers decide to follow in their footsteps.
