Launchcast is officially dead - well, not dead exactly, but effectively useless with the plus option gone. A lot of people on the official Yahoo Launchcast group are pretty upset about it - and understandably. Launch has shutdown taking people's years of ratings without giving them any way of getting them out.
Some comments by Yahoo staff on this group clearly point to SoundExchange being the root cause of the decision.
See this message:
"We considered just about every alternative, including raising the price of a subscription and making it a subscription-only service. The numbers just didn't add up. "
and this one:
"However, with royalty rates on the rise, we really couldn't afford to keep the service as-is"
So what options does someone wanting to discover new music have? Well first, I would suggest getting all your ratings out of Launch. Either using the LaunchScrobbler or using this tool to grab the data in CSV format. Then its off to Last.fm or maybe Rhapsody. Pandora is region locked of course so no use in India :) If you have a lot of music in your iTunes library, you could always use this tool. Or maybe, if you just wont to kill some time, you could watch a movie or read a book :)
1 comment:
Pandora's Box initially did work globally and it worked pretty well. I found some good new music that way.
Last.fm is ok but doesn't really give recommendations as well as Pandora did.
On the other hand, last.fm does have integration with almost every popular audio player you might use, so thats there.
There's a decent s60 version as well for use on Nokia phones.
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