My Hope for Satellite Radio

There was a meme going around not too long ago where you stated the first ten songs that randomly came up on your iPod. Well, I don't have an iPod, but I do like to play around with Yahoo Launch (I've written about this before), and these are the first ten songs it gave me.

New Order - Round & Round-94
Bright Eyes - Make War
Skinny Puppy - Second Tooth
Mercury Rev - Hudson Line
Ride - Like A Daydream
Uncle Tupelo - D. Boon
Kate Bush - Cloudbusting
Low - Standby
XTC - Real By Reel
The Pixies - Planet Of Sound

Quite a mixed bag! But some of my favorites are there. With Yahoo Launch, you rank your favorite songs and artists, and Yahoo plays those as well as songs that you may also like based on your selections. It's like a radio station except that you can skip songs you don't like. You can even watch specific videos for free. And, if they get their software right, they'll have quite a database of people's tastes to play with.

I like the service, and one day I plan to buy a subscription, either from it or one of it's competitors. I just use the free service for now, and would buy if there weren't several problems, such as it not be accessible through Firefox, freezing far too often in IE, and no classical music. But, services like this are far from mature, and I expect much innovation.

Best case, it would be connected to a satellite service so that I could get it any time I wanted. That would solve this problem, which I have noticed often. There is great music in every genre, but 90% of each is junk. I just want the good songs, and hopefully services like Yahoo Launch will catch on. If companies want us to rent music instead of buying it, this is the way to go.

UPDATE: Based on that post I linked to, I downloaded the song "Zombie" by Fela Kuti. Best 12 minutes of reggae I've ever heard.

UPDATE: D'oh! Turns out he's Nigerian. Best 12 minutes of Nigerian music I've ever heard then. Easily.