Well, my idea for my final project has shifted radically since my last musings. I originally was looking into peer to peer radio, however, i was never really comfortable with this idea, firstly as it was potentially beyond my skill and secondly it just didn’t POP enough. In the course of my dissertation research I covered many areas in which Internet culture has influenced the radio listener of today.
A topic that came up which really interested me was the effect of customised music (think last.fm, pandora and personal music players) on music discovery. Once upon a time this would have been a major weapon in radio’s arsenal. New singles, chart shows and exclusive interviews kept listeners tuning in to radio shows. However, with these new channels available to listeners to discover music, the radio model of linear structured broadcasts cant cater for listeners music tastes in the same way.
My plan is to offer up a new model for radio, one where the music playlists of a radio station can be substituted with customised music content. They most logical way to do this will be to merge online radio with last.fm, as preliminary research shows they have an api which allows users to stream music. I see two benefits of combining last.fm. The first is that while listening to a standard radio stream, say the bbc, whatever music is being played can generate a list of similar artists. The second is that, once a song is playing on the radio stream, the song can be phased out and a song from last.fm based on the users personal tastes can be played instead.
My knowledge of streaming online radio, and last.fm API is non-existant, but i imagine the most straightforward and streamlined way for me to create this application will be in actionscript 3. I will get started asap, as there is not all that much time left until the may hand-in!