Friedbeef’s Tech

It’s safe to say that Pandora and Last.fm has changed the face of Internet radio completely by doing such a good job of matching song playlists to users that it’s almost scary :)  Having said that, there’s always going to be a place for traditional Internet Radio stations because of their personality.  After all, many of us still enjoy tuning into a radio station every once in a while even though we’ve got our iPod loaded up.

The issue then lies in discovery, because of the sheer scale of Internet Radio where there are estimated to be at least 100,000 Internet Radio Stations streaming worldwide!  So how do you quickly pick out a station that you’ll probably like?  One Llama is a free service which allows you to discover Internet Radio Stations, by understanding what you like, then recommending relevant stations to you.

How One Llama understands your music tastes

By allowing you to search for artists or tracks, and showing you which stations have played them recently, it makes initial guesses as to what you may like.  If you choose to register for the service (you don’t have to – and registration is free anyway), One Llama will analyze the tracks you listen to online, and constantly refine its recommendations to continuously fine-tune its recommendations to you. 

How One Llama Makes its recommendations

Radio One Llama is constantly updating its database so that it "knows" the characteristics of each of over 30,000 stations, including their entire playlists.  It crawls Internet Radio stations and analyzes the data for patterns of similarity by artist, track and genre. They also have an accurate measure of what is being played when and where, and how often – so that users can search by location and popularity.  By matching what they know about the available music, and what you like – One Llama manages to come up with pretty good recommendations.

The Beef

Overall, this is a pretty useful service – and always useful to have up your sleeves in case your workplace bans Pandora and Last.fm :) .

Do you listen to streaming music online?  Tell us in the comments!