And here is why. The I ♥ radio app is an amazing concept. Put in a bunch of songs or bands that I like, and have a massive database of music spit out similar songs for me to listen to, in the same manner as picking a favorite radio station. However, sometimes, like on the radio, you end up getting a song you don’t like. Well, the nice thing about I ♥ radio is that you don’t have to suffer through the song. You can hit the skip button and it will skip to a new song that matches the criteria of songs you originally gave it, plus it now takes into consideration the song you didn’t like and looks to no longer play those types of songs. You can also give a thumbs up to songs you particularly enjoy to let the app know what songs you want it to play more.
Sounds amazing right? Well it totally would be except for the following issue. When starting your “radio station” you can only start from a single artist or song, meaning that the search crtieria of the app is not very good at the start. The more songs you listen to and approve or disapprove the better the app gets at picking out what you might like. The catch though lies in the statistical math that goes into how the app looks for music for you. These statistics are based solely on the songs you have told the app “I like” and “I don’t like”. So at the start, since the statistics have only the one song, its selection sucks, but as it plays songs for you and you specify “good” and “bad” songs the statistics get better. So the best thing to do when you start building your radio station is to listen to only the first 10 to 20 seconds of any song it starts playing for you and then skip to the next one after rating it. Given the width and bredth of music these days it will take near on 100 to 200 songs before your statistics get real spot on and the radio station is going to play what you want to hear 90% or so of the time. And here’s the catch. You can only skip through about 7 songs before the app forces you to listen to whole songs.
So instead of aiding you to build your perfect radio station, the app hinders your attempt by canceling out your ability to skip songs. Not only that, but because you are skipping through songs quickly at first, to help build your radio station, you invariable end up stuck on a song you don’t like and don’t want to listen to. So yeah, I hate the I ♥ radio app because it’s bad math for the sake of…something…I’m not even sure what…a bad attempt at trying to solve people’s ADHD? So yeah, it has the potential to be the amazing app that everyone seems to think it is, but it falls a little short…into a chasm…into which midgets are regularly chucked.
