Music to make websites to: The new radio

One of the more interesting presentations I saw last year at SXSW was a panel led by Jeff Croft, Veerle Pieters, Kelsey Ruger and Bryan Veloso titled "Design workflows at work." While the substance was somewhat of a point of debate among friends and acquaintances for the rest of the day, they hit on a couple of seemingly common-sense issues that deserve actual thought and consideration, not the least of which is: What music do you listen to while working?

Concentrating through the fire and flames
I love punk, hardcore and metal, and have for most of my life, but let's face it, Black Flag just isn't conducive to deep thought and focus, and I can't cmd+opt+shift+4 with one fist in the air. Since getting more into Web design, my musical taste has expanded in ways I never dreamed (or wanted to admit) it would. I'm now rocking (to use the term loosely) Rilo Kiley, the Shins, Jukebox the Ghost, LCD Soundsystem etc. all day at work. Cardigans and turtlenecks are sure to follow, but for now, while I can just pretend I'm 'maturing' – versus getting old and lame – I thought I'd give a rundown of a couple of my favorite ways to graze on some crunchy tunes at work.

1) The Music Genome Project, et al.
You know them, and likely either love or hate them, or love one and hate all the others. Be your preference as it may, Pandora is the O.G. of these musical comparative intelligence databases, dubbed the music genome project. This idea has been in the works for years, but has only been fleshed out fully enough recently to be of actual use. The concept is simple, you go to a website, type in a band you like, and out streams an hours-long playlist of delicious tunes that match up with the collective intelligence of you and those who have listened before you. You can vote individual songs up or down, and it learns as it plays. Eventually, if you're like me, you stop participating in the voting process, as you find you're left with about a dozen songs that fit your criteria once you've finished hating on everything under the sun. Because of that cold reality, these are a so-so means of staying entertained in a hostile environment with no itunes.

Some sites in this genre worth looking at:

Last.fm
This is one of the early players in the game, and they have a good interface, with lots of simple API services. For those of us who are feed-whores on our personal sites, this one will give you your most recently played tracks, top artists, albums and songs, all in RSS format, and even embed code to put your 'stations' on your site. They also let you build your personal taste profile just by listening to iTunes, with a neat little spy-app they call audioscrobbler. This is cool because you can listen to your music when you are at home, and then get similar stuff at work or wherever your music isn't. It also appears that they have videos now. On the con side, the encoding is a bit on the crap side as these things go, but most people won't be able to tell the difference on their 35-cent iPod headphones.

Pandora
As I said, they just about invented the technology as far as I know, and have a very slick flash player with a nice interface. They provide feeds as well, but they're not as full-featured as those at Last.fm. The musical selections are different with all of these sites, and I prefer the assumptions Pandora makes about the fact that I may have Head Automatica in my playlist over the ones that Last.fm makes (no, I don't want to listen to Good Charlotte, thanks). The audio quality here is also superior to Last.fm. All in all, if you don't want a lot of data about what you're doing on the site, this is a great player, with or without creating an account. If you do create an account, however, you have the flexibility to build your station based on multiple artists, tracks or albums, which the others don't allow to the same degree.

Finetune
Famous for their Wii player, Finetune was a later addition, I think. They don't let you build a multi-artist station, but rather encourage you to build playlists, a veritable online mix tape. These playlists consist of 45 or so specific songs (gasp!), a feature not allowed on any of the others. The downside is that they probably don't have the song(s) you want. Selection is a little thin here, but the artist radio is pretty good. Sound quality is about equivalent to Last.fm. The bottom line here is that this one is great for parties if you only have a Wii, and no computer hooked up to your home theater setup (quel dommage!)

Launch.com
Ugh, ok so I own some Yahoo! stock (it was really really cheap), so shouldn't knock it, and this site has been around since I was on a 486 PC with a 40 Meg hard drive, but something just doesn't do it for me about launch. Yahoo! needs to apply the same ingenuity they poured into Flickr to the rest of their work. 'nuff said, this one's a skip.

2) Streaming Radio—One Station to Rule Them All
Ok, after throwing all that out there, I must tell you that I have saved the absolute best for last. The only thing I listen to at work anymore is actually on iTunes radio, a little station called WOXY. Born in the 70s as WOXR for Miami of Ohio students, the "future of rock and roll" has taken things online (a couple times) and is cranking out great college radio and indie tunes all day long. You should definitely listen to it, and so should everybody that you know or have ever come in contact with. Of note here are the annual 97 best albums countdown, which you just missed, but will be re-aired new year's day, and their lounge acts segment, on which DC hometown favs Jukebox the Ghost will be performing January 10th. The only downside is the 64kbps stream they broadcast in, which is totally forgivable for the quality of selection.

So, what are you waiting for? Hop on over to woxy.lala.com and start rockin!