update: the service formerly owned by Yahoo! Music
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update: the service formerly owned by Yahoo! Music
LAUNCHcast is an Internet radio service offered by CBS Radio that plays music based on user ratings and preferences. Users with Yahoo! accounts can gain access to hundreds of thousands of songs sorted by artist, album, song and genre. The service, formerly offered by LAUNCH Media, and originally developed by Todd Beaupré and Jeff Boulter, debuted on November 11, 1999, and was purchased by Yahoo! in October, 2001. LAUNCHcast combined with CBS Radio beginning in February 16, 2009.
2001- 2009: LAUNCHcast powered by Yahoo! Music
LAUNCHcast allowed users to create personal radio stations or playlists of songs tailored to their musical tastes.
To create a personal station, users rated music on a 4-star or 100-point (depending on one's preference) scale. The service used those ratings to create a personal station of songs based on a user's favorite genres, artists, albums, and songs. The generated playlist contained a combination of rated and recommended songs. The ratio of rated/recommended songs could be specified by each user, but by default it was 50/50.
A recommendation engine suggested songs that might have matched a user's particular musical taste according to the following similarity criteria:
- Songs from the same artist
- Songs from the same album
- Songs from the same genre
- Songs recommended by users with similar musical tastes
- Songs recommended by Yahoo!
Users were not required to participate in the ratings system to listen to music. Pre-programmed stations based on theme, genre, or artist were available throughout the Yahoo! Music website.
Music videos could also be rated, allowing users to create personal music video channels as well. For legal reasons, specific songs could not be played whenever one wished. However, videos could be. The service could generate a personal video channel based on a single selection.
Free accounts
Users could share their personal stations publicly and listen to other users' stations.
Music was available for streaming for free at "Low" or "Medium" quality, although later these were combined into "Standard".
Between tracks, free accounts would hear commercial advertising for the Yahoo! service and its partners and affiliates. The advertisements were generally 30 seconds.
In 2007 Yahoo! added permanent banner ads to the LAUNCHcast player. Because Launchcast was only compatible with Internet Explorer, which charges for its banner ad blocker, users must either tolerate the banner ads or pay to block them. An alternative was to use the Yahoo! Music Engine, which was called Jukebox in version 2 of the same software. The Jukebox was unable to stream music anymore following September 2008, although it remained available for download well into the following year.
Limited skipping was available, at up to 5 skips per hour. Previously, banning a song skipped the song automatically, but this was removed. If the skips were not used in the previous hour, they did not roll over.
