Word: sonicnet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While the Internet is good to hobbyists like Carvalho, commercial Web radio has fallen upon draconian times. SORRY YOU MISSED US! reads the Web page where the Net radio source iCAST once stood. Like Imagine Radio (subsumed by Sonicnet, which was bought by MTV's interactive division) and Launch.com (being acquired by Yahoo!), it's one of the many Internet radio sources that have gone out of business or been taken over by large corporations in the past several months...
...listen to each on a scale of 0 to 5. I nixed rap and country, gave Top 40 a low priority and high marks to electronica, jazz, R. and B., classical and old-school rock. I named my station "Taylor Radio: Home of Tasteful Music." And what did Sonicnet choose for Taylor Radio's inaugural tune? Electric Youth, by that forgettable '80s pop singer Debbie Gibson. Ouch...
...further dismayed when the Dixie Chicks and Busta Rhymes turned up on my playlist. Not that I've got anything against them, but what happened to no country and no rap? It turns out that Sonicnet has its own intrinsic ratings for each artist; all your initial choices do is move these ratings up or down a star. At least you can pan artists as they're playing, making sure they don't play again, or skip ahead if your ears are hurting. But I won't be handing out the Web address for Taylor Radio until I've done...
...found the best sound on Tuneto (near CD quality rather than FM radio on Sonicnet and AM radio on Mongomusic), because it stores songs on your PC rather than streaming them. But it also seemed to suffer from short (and thus repetitive) playlists. I love Bjork, but there are only so many times I can hear Violently Happy in half an hour...
...finally got the call. Tim Nye, the co-founder of SonicNet (and I'm pretty sure, despite his denials, the Science Guy), wanted to interview me for a job at his new Internet start-up. He was vague on details about the company and said he couldn't tell me its name. He did, however, mention (a number of times) that it is pre-IPO. That was exactly how I dreamed it would happen...