Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Internet radio, the way I remember it, used to involve surfing through dozens of poorly spelled stations, all of them ending in “z,” to find the tunez my eardrumz craved so fervently. What I expected was a seamless aural experience, but what I got was a different story entirely, a perversion of a hallowed invention that’s been around for more than a hundred years.

Clicking on a station should’ve called forth a river of music everflowing, and it did. For, like, about five seconds. Each second thereafter would constantly cut out, in a shuddering carousel of sound that made you want to get all indignant and demand where, exactly, your connection went. Best guess? Somewhere just north of Canada and slightly east of wherever Britney Spears hides her underwear nowadays.

Things have changed, though, and I was recently introduced to this. It’s a fascinating way to expand your musical palate, with a pleasing interface that makes you want to get all up ins without the constant stop-and-go of yore. More interesting is the technology itself, which claims something or another about how every song has hundreds of musical genes, and how your tastes gravitate toward specific genetic sequences, whatever that means. All I know is there’s a lot of relevant music coming from a website with big, shiny buttons. And what if you were to pair this cutting edge genome with programs of ill repute designed to collect music permanently on your hard drive? Shame on you for even thinking that.