Vanderbilt Emergency Medicine

It has been said that inspiration comes in many forms. For many, this can come in any variety of designs or even in something like music. In our iPhone and iPod driven society where the word "MP3" is used almost interchangeably with the word "song," it's no surprise that streaming radio is experiencing a re-emergence.

Most people remember sites like Alive365 or YouStream that existed with the sole purpose of providing streaming radio online to anyone at any time. In their models, traditional radio programs were simply syndicated via online means which opened up their market to a world wide audience and didn't limit them to local channels. Well, that was back then.

Youth culture has greatly influenced technology over the past several years and this hasn't been limited to fashion. With technology in virtually every avenue of everyday life, todays hi-tech is now decidedly simpler. So what does that mean? In order to sell to todays youth companies have evolved to produce software and internet solutions that are much easier to use while infinitely more complicated behind the scenes.

Sites like Last.fm and Pandora have adapted this model as well. Giving the user control to create their own "radio station" of streaming music based on similar artists or songs to an initial artist or song, has given these sites true success. Projects like the 'music genome' and others have produced simple linkages that give initial comparisons and similarities that draw linkages in music. Using the simple power of database analysis while gathering user opinions of songs further refines this idea. 

More recently, Apple has adopted the same idea only they've applied it to iTunes with their implementation of the Genius Toolbar.