Presenting our newest guest writer – gadget guru and music enthusiast (a combination we really like) Ershad Kaleebullah who is active on twitter as r3dash and can be found doing geeky things at MySmartPrice. Ershad starts for us by writing about a very resourceful-looking music portal he recently discovered, Radiooooo.
I like discovering new music and read MusicAloud regularly for recommendations. However, even for me, thanks to my tight schedule, discovering good music from the sheer swathe of tunes out there becomes difficult. Now, when a service came along and provided me with a treasure trove of songs across decades from different countries in an easy-to-use interface, my ears naturally perked up. Radiooooo is one such service and has a tagline ‘The Musical Time Machine’, which is apt.
The oddly-named Radiooooo’s premise is simple – explore music historically and geographically – as creator Benjamin Moreau, artist and DJ, puts it succinctly. On opening the website, you are presented with a beautifully hand-drawn map of the world. After you choose a country of your choice and any decade from the 20th/21st century, the service will play a tune for you curated by one of the 30,000 ‘Treasure Hunters’ (what a cool name no?) who work for Radiooooo. You can also create a login if you wish to and submit music as well. Logging in to Radiooooo also lets you like music and save it for listening later.
The moment I fired up the service, just the novelty factor of listening to music from across the globe was enough to keep me hooked. Oh btw, if you look closely you will find ‘Party Island’ and ‘Neverland’ in the map, two fictional places created by Radiooooo. It is quite ingenious I must add.
Do note that all the curated songs have a certain aesthetic that Radiooooo itself finds hard to define. All I’d like to say is that I didn’t listen to a single bad song during my time with Radiooooo. That said, the service doesn’t allow you to skip songs and the content is limited at the moment and as a result the same songs keep playing over and over again. For example, there are only a few obscure Indian artists, like Sandunes and Donn Bhatt, who have been curated for the contemporary songs section.
There is a mobile app for Android as well, but it is not as good as the desktop website. Do give it a try and let me know what you think. Until then, I am going back to listening Sullen Fable’s wonderful ethereal Monsoonsiren that Radiooooo played as I was just winding up this article.
