Do online make-your-own radio stations turn music into Muzak?
THERE’S ALMOST SOMETHING comforting about the inaccuracy of Sonicnet’s make-your-own radio stations. The free service, available at radio.sonicnet.com, creates a customized audio stream based on your rating of genres and individual artists. You can specify, for example, that you want to hear lots of East Coast rap, no West Coast rap, and just a bit of soul, and that you prefer Lil’ Kim to Foxy Brown. It should in theory be more enjoyable than regular radio. Yet my station, a combination of alternative ’80s music, indie rock, and ambient, plays songs I hate, including tracks by Jesus Jones and the Cranberries. Sure, I can remove those artists from the playlist and work to make my station cater to my tastes much more precisely, but I’m a bit relieved that my predilections can’t be easily reduced to an algorithm. At least not on Sonicnet. Elsewhere in cyberspace, though, a variety of streaming audio sites and new music browsers are promising a musical experience that’s personalized to an
