Well, it isn’t really an app…the title is a lie! From word one, this blog post is a work of complete fiction.
It is cool, though. So…yay?
Many moons ago, before they were forced to regionalize their service and cut off anyone outside the US, I used to sometimes use Pandora when I was in the mood for music. Start off with one song or band and let it (and your up or down votes) fill up your channel with music you might like. It was pretty damn fair from perfect (have a lot of rock and add one Johnny Cash song and it’s time for a cavalcade of awful fake-twang bullshit artists!), but it was a nice way to break out from what I already have and listen to.
Tubeify sort of fits that bill.
Sign up for an email to be sent when they have space…in my case, that took all of about a minute. And that’s it. You can log in with your Google or Facebook account. And you’re off. Any time after that initial log in, it just brings you right to the music player.
It’s kind of a bastard son of Youtube and some people involved with Last.FM. Look up music by all kinds of search parameters…what’s popular in any given country or city (Edmonton, your taste in music is shameful) for example. Or type in anyone and get a playlist of their stuff. I’ve run my usual tests to see how well this works. Porcupine Tree (really good proggy guitar rock band that you should probably listen to) : check. Dead Prez (extremely political rap act) : check. Killingbird : check. 60’s era Motown : check. Cadence Weapon (Edmonton rapper…also the city’s current poet laureate!) : check. Richard Cheese (amusing lounge cover versions of popular rock and rap) : check. And so on. It seems to be fairly wide ranging, but the playlists are limited to tracks that have Youtube videos (whether official or those shitty fan made ones with a static image on screen for 4 and a half minutes), but aside from that you’re good to go. You can also break things down to individual albums if you want to.
The best part of the service…seems to be unavailable for the moment (which sucks) : The Billboard charts. You can listen to the stuff from now, OR you can use the Top Charts with Time Travel to listen to the most popular songs for any given period back in to 1965. Think of it as an annum based shuffle mode. It also kind of exposes the fact that popular music featuring a lot of crap is not a new thing by any means. According to Tubeify they’re getting an api error from Billboard right now, so hopefully it gets fixed tout suite.
Anyway, check that shit out! And just to pimp something delightful real quick, here is some Richard Cheese :
