Songza Sets Launches With Curated Playlists
Tired of a computer picking your tunes?
The folks behind music search engine Songza have just launched Songza Sets, a free net music service that offers 12 song original playlists or sets created by humans organized into three categories: mainstream pop, American roots, and independent.
The theory behind for SongzaSets is that the best listening
experiences are created by people who love music, not by computers (aka Pandora). Instead, a team of curators packages songs in
hopefully interesting, informative and fun ways. A SongzaSet might chronicle the evolution of traditional folk murder
ballads, sample foreign chart toppers, or present a digest of this week’s most blogged-about songs. Each
Set also comes with commentary.
“There is an abundance of good music online, but a lack of high-quality music programming,” said Peter Asbill of Songza Sets. “With Songza Sets, we aim to offer that excellent listening experience – the kind that is original, relevant, informative, and thematic, but pleasantly unpredictable. In order to do this, we ask our curators to roll up their sleeves, filter through all the music out there, and thoughtfully create interesting programming.”
Nothing new.
Some guys have been doing it for ages for jazz or for world music
http://www.radiovideojazz.com/
http://www.radiovideotrad.com/
Ok, I hate to be the nitpicker, but Pandora isn’t exactly picked by computers — the ‘music genome project’ had musicologists classify music on a few hundred different parameters, so that playlists are based on relatively objective criteria *identified a human*. I think that explains a lot of their popularity. And most other services are based on shared preferences of thousands of people in aggregate statistics, so those are really ‘human’ as well. That said, I’m not trying to say the Songza approach is flawed, and I like the idea of having some sort of commentary attached — tends to make the music more accessible, like getting a recommendation from a friend.
ditto on the Pandora comment.. Songza gets used in my home more so than every Music 2.0 site on the Internet. It’s a great simple service…