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LAUNCHcast

launch.yahoo.com

Methodology

LAUNCHcast is an established personalized streaming internet radio service that uses user-input ratings of tracks, albums, and artists to generate a similar music network that drives the service's recommendations. The service also uses genre and mood tags to help form its recommendations. LAUNCHcast also features a limited social aspect in the form of influencers - other listeners who a user lists as having tastes that influence the music played on his/her station.

Pros and Cons

LAUNCHcast is a relatively straightforward and powerful service with a large music library to back it up. The service features a very high degree of personalization, as the listener has the option, but not the obligation, to rate any or all the music he/she owns. The LAUNCHcast player is easy to use and makes rating music a breeze. The music recommendations are decent, although recommendations by genre tend to be off the mark and the service tends to recommend too much music that would appeal primarily to a mainsteam audience. The almost total lack of similar listener networks is by far the most important thing keeping LAUNCHcast from becoming a premier personalized music recommendation service.