Meemix is Personalizing Playlists

So, after a lengthy, school-induced hiatus from The Tech Brief, I’m back with a long-overdue review of Meemix, another new personalized, Internet radio service. Having come across it shortly after falling head over heels for Pandora, my expectations were high, so Meemix had a lot to live up to.

Like other personalized Internet radio sites, Meemix uses an algorithm to determine what songs it will play for you. The algorithm makes its calculations based on song parameters and information about the user. Each song can be rated from 6 (Hot) to -6 (Not), and Meemix works with the high scored songs while driving the others away. It boasts creating its playlists based on an understanding of personal taste rather than simply finding songs that are similar to the ones you tell it you like. I’m not sure how that works, but that’s what they say.

So how does it actually work? Well after using it for a few weeks, I’m not too impressed. Until today, my first station didn’t deliver anything that I like aside from the song I originally fed it to create the first station and it always starts with a Linkin Park song. It took a few hours today for a string of songs that I actually liked to start playing, and the station always plays songs from several bands that I have repeatedly rated -6 at first. It rarely plays any of the favorites I’ve defined. My second station actually delivered a really great playlist almost immediately. Unfortunately, the interface completely died, so I couldn’t rate or save any of the awesome songs I heard that day. Since then it has frozen up on me repeatedly.

But the very shiny, Web 2.0 Meemix does have it’s good points, without a doubt. It’s easy to use and it makes it extremely easy for you to log and acquire the music that you actually like (so long as a song on that album happens to play). And—of course—it’s free, being ad-supported, and has the community and other features everyone expects from today’s startups. Undoubtedly, Jango will be one of its prime competitors, being another of the younger Internet radio services. I think Meemix has a lot of potential, but I don’t think I’ll switch to using it exclusively, just because I can’t really create stations that are as specific as Pandora’s unless it’s specifically genre based. Playing songs that sound like ones you like may be an old formula, but it works.

Meemix is in private beta at the moment, but you can learn more and request an invite at meemix.com.