The Day the Music Stops

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One of my biggest worries as Yahoo! has continued to garner more and more bad press relating to their financial situation is that I would lose access to their services. I doubt that a situation would come up that would result in all of Yahoo!’s services simply ceasing to exist, but I do worry that their services would get folded into another, inferior service. (For example, I worry that, if Microsoft ever buys Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail would be absorbed into Hotmail, which I find far clunkier to use.) I don’t want to say that my experiences with Yahoo! have been perfect over the years, but I’ve been using so many of their services for so long that it would be supremely difficult to move over to another company’s services.

Unfortunately, the move has already begun. A few weeks ago Yahoo! announced it would be selling its Launchcast music service to CBS. For a few years now I’ve been a subscriber to their Launchcast Plus service, which makes their Internet radio services far more robust than their free offerings. I spent a very long time getting my Internet radio station customized just the way I like it; it still plays too much Simon and Garfunkel for my liking (I like Simon and Garfunkel, just not that much), and when CBS takes Launchcast over, they’re going to discontinue the custom radio stations. In all honesty, I haven’t used the custom radio station so much lately because I tend to need a certain genre of music at a particular time (new age, folk, etc.), but on the whole my station was a great place to turn to when I just needed music, and I even directed some of my students to the station when they asked me for recommendations for music.

In order to make up for the upcoming demise of my Launchcast station, I’ve started a last.fm account. I started moving my CD collection to my computer over the winter break, and as much as I don’t like listening to lossy MP3s, I guess that the compression doesn’t really bother me unless I’m paying particular attention to the music. (Believe me, these days I hardly ever have free time just for listening to music.) I’d heard good things about last.fm for a while now, and I guess that for now it’s fun to tinker with, but it looks like the custom radio stations aren’t as easy to tinker with as Launchcast’s were. Anyway, I’ll switch my radio station link in the right-hand bar once Launchcast moves to CBS over to my last.fm link, and in the meantime I’d invite you all to listen to my last.fm station if you’d like, and add me as a friend on there if you have an account too.

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