MusicMatch RadioMX gets better

Recently I wrote about the MusicMatch RadioMX service, and it's gotten even better. They recently introduced their "Platinum" service, and I cannot believe how much I enjoy listening to music online.

The basic RadioMX service gives you a couple of dozen genre "stations" to select from, and the mixes are commercial free and professionally selected. They provide a "station mixer" that lets you pick a little disco, a lot of big band, and some show tunes - whatever your preference is. You save this "mix" and it rotates through the selections. This is about $40/year and a delight.

But the "Platinum" service goes much better with "Artist on Demand". You can pick from the many artists in the catalog, and play their music and that of related artists, which provides a much higher degree of control over what you listen to. You cannot pick or replay a particular song, and there are limits to how often you can "skip" past a song you don't care for - these are restrictions from the record labels - but it's not at all onerous.

Their playlist management is sophisticated, though it still has a couple of bumps - it's a new service. I've gotten a handful of Javascript errors on both Mozilla and IE, but I presume they will get these worked out over time.

Sound quality is outstanding. I have very high-end DSL service, so perhaps I have a skewed view, but I believe I've had sound "cutout" perhaps three times in two months even at CD quality. They do substantial buffering that goes a long way to avoid these problems, and it's yet another area they've done a great job.

The Platinum service is $60/year would be a bargain at triple the price, and I cannot say enough good things about MusicMatch. I just gave a year's subscription to RadioMX Platinum as a gift, and it only took a few minutes for it to register as a big hit.

I positively love MusicMatch.

Posted by Steve at December 27, 2002 09:06 PM | TrackBack