Radiola is an online radio project planned for many years. A couple of channels ran for a couple of years, but things never gelled.

Now, through the magic of technical improvements on the Web, music2.0, Radiola World is a reality!

Here’s the first episode.
It’s a LastFM playlist, a college-radio-type, free-form mix based on the idea that music of all genres can share the same space. Intimidated by time and salesmanship, it isn’t easy to imagine these mixes, but if it’s done well, a mix can introduce you to new sounds in a way that makes them easy to hear, and bring new insights to familiar music. Free-form has a long history and lots of stations use the format. Check out more info and links at radiola/blogger, also the home of the radiola music programs.

There’s no reason to rely on just one format. Here are the music2.0 options we’ve been using:

Deezer. By using other similar services we’re open to other music collections. Deezer is a great example of this. It allows you to lock the playlist order, more like a radio program, and create a number of playlists. The player looks good, showing a thumbnail of the album the current track is from. radiola #3 is on Deezer

LastFM offers many other options, including “similar artists,” a system generated stream which we’re using as our French Music Hall show, and tag radio, a selection of music labeled by users, which we’re exploring.

It seems tag radio can be activated only as a paid service or with “global,” or shared, tags. You could create two accounts to fake sharing, if you wished. Sharing tags opens the possibility of any number of people collaborating on a program. Pretty cool. The downside is that I don’t think you can close a tag. Here’s a radiola shared tag. Anyone could sign up at LastFM and add to it.

Another LastFM option: you can upload your own music. Original music or radio-style productions could theoretically be incorporated into a radio show. Though this is not their intention, so we’ll see if it works that way.

Our first episode was made using LastFM. The link is up above.

Finetune is about the same as lastFM for our purposes. Not bad selection and it offers something better — multiple playlists, great looking player, though it poops out some times, and it, too, shuffles the playlist. radiola #2 is on finetune.

Slacker makes it really easy to create a mix. You can’t call the tune or the order, but you can select the artists and choose a few other settings, making as many mixes as you like. You can see ours here.

Pandora. We’re not using this yet because you have to log in to listen and there’s no way to create a radio-like playlist. But I like the QuickMix option that generates an excellent variety from your stations if you create them with that purpose in mind. If you have a Pandora account, here’s a mix.

The podcast model, where DJs present selections from their own collections of music, is another excellent option. We’re open to that, too. We made a sample, here with mysplayer and mediamax.

There are many other ways to stream music on the web, which we will explore and exploit. Stay tuned.

– Lenny