Generally saying, I'm very dissatisfied with online music offerings -- or rather, the lack of them.
Please note that many of the services you keep praising in your posts above, are only available in a handful of countries -- it's very typical of such "subscription services" to be discriminatory against most people around the world. You simply need to reside in one of the few "lucky countries", in order to be able to subscribe to them. It's disgusting.
I even used to be a paying Last FM subscriber (here is my
Last FM profile page), until LastFM came up with the grand idea earlier this year, to lock out users from around the world from their site, except for 5 or 6 super-big countries. So, even if I wanted to
pay them for their service, they would no longer let me.
And even though I enjoyed LastFM's "suggestion radio stations", they did
not fully satisfy me. I hate categorizing music (or literature, for that matter) into
genres. A song, or a book, is either good or bad --
regardless of genre. The thing is, LastFM kept pushing me into listening to music of a particular genre -- which I hate to do, and want to avoid at all costs.
The online radio station that comes closest to my ideal, is the delightfully eclectic
Radio Paradise. Jim & Rebecca don't hesitate to mix Led Zeppelin with Mozart -- that's how it should be!
However, even Radio Paradise has its flaws: for one thing, it's prejudiced against certain music genres, and refuses to play them, regardless of quality -- and I reject such prejudices. For example, they won't play hip-hop music under any circumstances. I'm definitely no hip-hop fan, but at the same time I recognize there are top-quality, important artists working in that genre, such as Black Eyed Peas, whose music I greatly enjoy and admire.
A second flaw of Radio Paradise is that it's heavily focused on "Anglo-Saxon" music, that is, music from English-speaking countries, and predominantly sung in English. Yes, they do include "non-English" songs here and there, but there is no balance whatsoever.
If anyone here on MobileRead could give me a hint as to where I could find a station similarly eclectic to Radio Paradise, but balanced in terms of playing music from
around the world, I would appreciate such a hint.
Does such a radio station even exist?
The situation seems so desperate and bleak to me, that it almost seems as if I had to found such a station myself, in order to enjoy it.
And if I were a millionaire, I'd definitely found it -- but I'm not.
To clarify, I'm
not interested in anything of the sort usually labelled "world music" -- nope, that's just another
genre, you know, consisting of obscure songs and artists. Nope, what
I'm looking for is a radio station that would play the
best music of
all genres from
all countries. I believe we have quite a few top-quality rock and pop artists in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (both today and in past decades) -- but has any one of you ever heard of a Slovak or Czech rock or pop artist? Nope... because you're imprisoned in your "Anglo-Saxon" radio stations.
And I'd like to
avoid that for myself. It's tragic... you never get to hear
any music on radio stations in my country, except for "Anglo-Saxon" music and local (Slovak/Czech) music. But what about music at least from the
neighbouring countries? Forget it! There is
nothing. And not because of lack of musical quality in those neighbouring countries, I assure you. It's because the DJs don't give a damn about musical quality -- they're a bunch of lazy and/or corrupt dogs mostly only there to collect their paychecks. Whenever I think of that, I must chant with The Smiths:
Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music that they constantly play
It says nothing to me about my life
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music they constantly play
Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ
Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ
[/rant]
