Music Streaming: Pandora and Launch

When you work from home it’s nice to have music on in the background but it can mean that you get bored of your own music .

In order to overcome the boredom issue I’ve now tried both Pandora and Launch from Yahoo. These are both streaming music services which allow you to build your own channel and define the music you like. They both then use this information to play the music you have said you like, but also music they think you might like.

I liked both of them, but have some observations :

• Pandora is only available to people in the US – it’s not Pandora’s fault it’s down to the license they can get from the music industry.
• Launch has a low, medium and high quality option – the medium quality doesn’t sound (to me) as good as the Pandora format. The high quality might sound better but I’m not willing to pay to find out.
• Pandora allows you to say whether you like some music or not, Launch has a star rating system on the artist, the album and the track. I prefer the Launch approach because it seems to mean that stuff a really like gets played more often.
• Pandora, being only available in the US has a more US biased set of music – that’s fine when I’m in the mood for US music, but not when I want something more UK biased. Launch has better UK music coverage.
• Pandora doesn’t appear to have any classical music.
• Launch times-out on the free version far earlier than Pandora does.
• Launch has adverts – Pandora doesn’t.
• Launch has videos too – not that it makes much difference to me.
• Launch has a better way of showing ‘people who liked this music also liked this’.

Like I say – I like both of them but tend to prefer…Pandora .