Yahoo! Music offers a totally free service called LAUNCHcast Radio. You can create your own personalized station, which will allow you to listen to hours of free, streaming music which includes your favorite selections. But you can do this only if you know how to configure the service properly.
The first thing you need to do to configure Yahoo! Music’s LAUNCHcast Radio is to set up your radio station. While you’re listening, you can create your own personalized radio station in Yahoo! Music Jukebox, on the Yahoo! website, or in Yahoo! Messenger by rating artists, songs and albums. You can tell the software which songs you want to listen to by rating songs, artists and albums on a scale of one to four. Also, you can click the red circle with a cross through it in order to ban tracks, artists or albums from playing ever again in LAUNCHcast Radio.
It takes time to customize and personalize your station in Yahoo! Music’s LAUNCHcast Radio, but your efforts will pay off in the end. First, search in the search bar for the artists, songs or albums you like. Then, click on the 30-second preview of your favorite songs and rate them a 4. You may also click on Yahoo! LAUNCHcast Radio and select Edit Music Tastes to select preferences for your personalized station. Selecting not to hear explicit lyrics may cut you off from hearing some of the newer music which has been produced in the last ten years.
The most effective way to search for general keywords in Yahoo! Music’s LAUNCHcast Radio is by searching on Album or Song. That way, especially if your search is somewhat obscure, you will get the most search results. This is the best way to search for a general genre which isn’t listed in Yahoo! LAUNCHcast Radio genres. If you know the precise name of the artist or song or album you wish to listen to, then be sure to select the right search type in the drop-down box beside the search field in order to get the best results.
After this, Yahoo! Music will begin to make suggestions based on your genre preferences. This will probably include some newer music when you first get started, even if all your favorites are oldies. Be sure to rate this music promptly to properly personalize your station. If you don’t like a song, you can click all three red circle icons to ban it forever. One quirk about Yahoo! Music’s LAUNCHcast Radio is that you must ban the track, artist and album never to listen to a song again. If you ban a single track or album, but rate the artist a 4, Yahoo! LAUNCHcast Radio will not ban the track, but will rather continue to play it along with the stream. One potential solution to this is to rate the artist lower, such as giving him a single star rather than four stars.
I set up my station for primarily progressive rock from the 1970s. I rated artists such as The Moody Blues, Gerry Rafferty and 10cc highly. LAUNCHcast Radio made continual suggestions based on my genre preferences, and I was able to quickly set up my station so that I could listen to the music I liked. Once I was finished with my rating, my station consistently served up a mix of the above artists, along with other artists including ABBA, Styx, Foreigner, Chicago, the Manfred Mann Band, Steely Dan and the Bee Gees. It even inserted a little bit of classical music from composers such as Vivaldi.
I discovered that I was able to listen to music for absolutely free which I could not have found any other way. I discovered some of the Bee Gees’ earlier work which they produced in the 1960s, including an album entitled “Idea.” I found music for Zen meditation, ancient Chinese and Japanese songs which I doubt I could have listened to anywhere else.
Once you’ve gotten started creating your personalized radio station, you may create moods based on your station. Simply click on Create a New Mood below the My Station section. Give your mood a name, and then select a genre or series of genres for your station. For example, I created a “New Music” genre with all the rock genres selected so that I could hear some of the music which has been produced recently. I created an “Asian” mood by selecting the Asian subgenre under the World Genre. I primarily intended this as a meditation station, so it required quite a bit of rating. I banned anything which didn’t fit the music I wanted to hear, and rated all the traditional Chinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern music highly. I created another separate meditation mood by selecting the Meditation subgenre under the Themes genre. I also created a New Age mood, which played more modern meditation music such as Kitaro, Vangelis and Enya.
No matter what your genre preferences are, you can set up a station or mood to suit them. For example, if you like Jazz, you could set up a mood for your favorite jazz artists, tracks and albums. Go ahead and set up a separate station for each different genre; for example, one for Big Band/Swing and another for Smooth Jazz and yet another for Modern Jazz. If you love rock, you can set up separate stations for Hard Rock, Metal, Indie Rock, Garage Rock, Grunge Rock, Prog Rock and Brit Rock, if you like. Or you can set up your moods by era, such as 60s, 70s or 80s. You can also create another mood with all your favorites lumped together. That way, you’ll be sure to get a stream of music that perfectly fits whatever mood you are in at the moment. You can set up a wide variety of moods, such as a mood for your kids, a comedy mood, a mood with nothing but film scores, soundtracks, or Broadway scores. If you like hard to find or obscure music, Yahoo! LAUNCHcast music is definitely the right service to be using.
Trying to personalize your moods can be very frustrating when you select the wrong music genres. So be sure to check the genres carefully to see if there’s one that matches the music you want to hear very closely. For example, when I tried to create a meditation station by selecting New Age and all the World subgenres, I found the process very frustrating. However, I recreated my mood by selecting Meditation under the Themes genre and suddenly found I was hearing the music I wanted to hear and which I had rated in search.
You can also customize Yahoo! Music’s LAUNCHcast Radio’s stations by rating music while listening. You can find many stations by clicking the More Stations link in the Station Guide to the left of the browser window in Yahoo! Music Jukebox. If you’re looking for genuine classical music, for example, you’ll need to click “Classical Light.” “Classical” and “Classical Crossover” contain large amounts of modern music from artists such as Paul Potts which you probably don’t want to hear. If you do want to hear these modern selections, you can easily set up a classical mood for your station.
In the Radio Home screen, Yahoo! Music Jukebox will show the stations you’ve recently listened to so that you can access them more easily. This is very handy when you’re wanting to listen to a Yahoo! radio station which you’ve personalized, rather than your own station or moods.
