Dean Nelson

Like Pandora but much cooler, finetune is probably the best internet radio I’ve used yet.

The one thing I really love about Pandora is that you can give the thumbs up/down to songs played, thereby teaching the player what you like and what you don’t; unfortunately, finetune lacks this option. However, finetune allows you to skip through as many songs as you’d like (or should I say, don’t like) thereby allowing you to cut through the crap. Not to say that there’s much crap here – the automatic station creator is actually really intelligent (much more so than LAUNCHcast). The finetune team says that that their secret sauce is made of “7 years of accumulated listener data; Almost 100 Million listener hours; 13,000 user created playlists; a pinch of salt to taste” – and it shows.

I really enjoy firetune’s layout and slickness. The song quality is great, as is the variety. I also like how finetune invites you to explore playlists of other users in a very social but not-shitty-like-MySpace fashion.

finetune has a feature unique to the internet radio stations I’ve used in the ability to tag songs, artists, and albums with genres (or anything, really) to describe that music. Those tags are then publicly displayed across the finetune network wherein you can listen to music that matches the tag you specify.

Another really cool feature is the ability to embed playlists into websites. Here’s my first playlist:

Make your own playlist at http://finetune.com.

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