Culture RADIO REDISCOVERED: 8 TRACKS By Mary Yuengert/Assoc. Culture Editor
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here are always those days when you’re in the mood for a certain type of music. So what do you do when a) you’re broke (oh wait, that’s every day) and you don’t have money to spend on iTunes, b) none of the bands in your music library can give you what you want, c) you find yourself skipping multiple songs on Pandora or d) all of the above?
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hile most of us are familiar with Pandora (a free online radio station that takes your current music tastes and creates a “personalized” radio station that plays music you should like), it often times fails to feel very personal. Some people are uncomfortable with the idea of a machine telling them what music is “their type,” the self-proclaimed “iTunes shuffle surfers” (guilty as charged) get annoyed at the three-song skip limit per hour aspect, while the easily bored get sick of hearing repeat songs on their favorite stations. Despite Pandora’s promise to “create a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you,” I find the need to enjoy my music in a more personalized way.
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tracks.com managed to give me that more intimate experience with music, and I’ve never looked back. See you later Pandora. I was hooked as soon as I read the site’s vision: “8tracks believes handcrafted music programming trumps algorithms.” The idea behind the site came from the old eight track mix-tapes in the
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Photo courtesy of JMaz/Flickr
‘70s and ‘80s, when people would personally create a mix of eight songs and share them with family, friends or my personal favorite, a boyfriend or girlfriend. I’m a sucker for ‘80s romance and John Hughes. It was a way to discover new music, network and interact with music on a more personal level.
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s a new brand of internet radio, 8tracks.com prides itself by living up to the slogan, “Radio, rediscovered.” It offers users two options: to create mixes or listen to them. You start by typing in an artist or genre and the site generates a list of mixes that involve those keywords, all personally created by users on the site. Need some study music to keep you focused in the library? Type in tags like “study,” “classical” or “instrumental” to score a list of awesome playlists that some like to call “musical Adderall.”
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r maybe you decided to throw a last minute Mod party and are scrambling for tracks that will wrangle in a crowd? Search by “party,” “dubstep” or “dance” to win over your friends and ensure your party is a success. If you find yourself falling in love with a song (don’t worry, it happens to the best of us), you can star the track for easy access later on or buy the song right there through a direct link to iTunes.
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or those whose inner DJ tendencies are screaming to get out, 8tracks provides the perfect setting to experiment, make your mark on the Internet and even win
March 2013