Site: Compare My Radio

by Matt on 11 January 2010

comparemyradio.com Keeping track of the playout information from the UK's radio stations, enabling you to pick the radio station that suits you. #ep09

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Pros

Sounds good

Great idea for a site this: simple but something that just works. The idea is obviously that you compare radio stations to find your perfect match. So for example you may come from another country/planet; want to try a new station; are bored of Lady Gaga; aren’t sure if you can commit to actually moving the dial or just love statistics.

Each station gets a variety gauge - a percentage score of just how different the output is - and unique tracks - the total number of different individual tunes played over a month. These are expressed through nice simple venn diagrams and charts. Thus giving you argument settlers as to which is best station, i.e. Capital FM has a variety of only 3% and plays a mere 230-odd different tracks over 30 days. Meaning you can back up what you’ve always suspected: it’s a bit repetitive.

You can also view each artist’s page to see which of their tracks get most played and in turn where those tracks get played. Makes sense? Have a play…

Cons

Turn it down

You can get a bit stuck in a never-ending loop, jumping from station to artist to track and then back to station again. Told you it was simple. The journeys don’t go much beyond that.

And whilst simplicity is good they could do so much more with the data, in a similar style to the way the BBC /music site works: aggregating info from Wikipedia and MusicBrainz on the artists. Perhaps more external links to go explore some more. Or dare I say it, a chance to buy the track? Maybe that’s over-commercialising things…

And this may just be me but there doesn’t seem to be that many stations. What happened to the digital radio revolution? I’m sure there are more than that in the UK… could be amazing if they brought in satellite, internet and pirate radio.

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