For today I moved to Songza, a streaming music service with a twist. Unlike Slacker and Jango, it has no randomly generated stations based on some artist. Every station is essentially a curated playlist that plays in random order. While this makes the service more limited, it is counterbalanced with excellent curation and a very great variety of stations.
Another interesting feature is that there is a "concierge" mode that categorizes some selected stations based on the day of the week and time of day, a very neat idea. You can also browse for a station, or search for all stations that contain a particular artist or keyword. Oddly, you can create your own station, but you can't listen to it (from the same account at least, wink wink), which makes it difficult to pick particular interpretations for classical music.
The selection of tracks is difficult to tell because unless you make a station you can't browse tracks or albums. There are no audio ads, and the visual ads are not obtrusive. The app is very well made, stable, easy to use and visually appealing. It also includes a timer and a easy way to see what tracks were played and sharing them (as long as you don't switch to another channel). A big flaw is that there's no option to disable mobile data usage, though I noticed it automatically uses a reasonable lower quality for sound and album art to save bandwidth.
So, this gets very close to what I was looking for. A good balance between discovery and curation, at least good enough to make random stations of other services look clumsy in comparison. I highly recommend Songza.
Published on August 16, 2012 at 21:16 EDT
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