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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting, but one of the big draws of Pandora is the ability to like/dislike a song and have a station get more and more tailored to what I like. This seems to just be a random sampling of indie stuff.

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It's much more niche than Pandora, but I can see that if you like the kind of music it plays (mostly poorly-recorded very-indie rock songs of about two minutes in length, as far as I can tell) then you might like it better than Pandora, which has the downside that it seems to wind up playing a fairly small subset of songs on rapid rotation, at least in my experience.

Pandora aims to replace radio. This just aims to replace one radio station. Good luck to 'em.

One vertical to begin with isn't a bad strategy. I think the one they've chosen is a good vertical to start with — the genre has a strong online community looking for new things. If it works with indie music, Mixest can broaden out.

Of course this might not be what they're intending to do at all.

If I understand correctly, they're playing unsigned garage bands who want extra exposure and not paying any royalties. That will limit their ability to expand outside genres where such bands are common.

I wonder what kind of quality control they have. Will they accept my five-minute a capella nose-singing version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow?

In the 2 minutes I've spent on there I've seen a number of artists I don't know (which could be unsigned garage bands) and number that I do including Of Montreal and Animal Collective — both well respected and successful groups. I'm not sure what quality control they have, but it doesn't seem like all they're looking for is unsigned groups.

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