There are countless online radio stations scattered across the web, covering topics ranging from sports and talk radio to eclectic folk music, and everything in between. Because of the dizzying amount of choices, it can be difficult to sift through each station to find one that fits your musical personality the best – you might know it’s out there, but you don’t know how to find it.
An Illinois based startup OneLlama, has aggregated many of these stations into a single hub called Radio OneLlama, allowing users to quickly identify the stations that best fit their tastes. The site is currently in private beta, but you can grab one of 500 invites here (enter the invite code “techcrunch”).
The site has a very spartan interface, primarily consisting of a single search bar asking you to enter your favorite artist. After entering the musician of your choice, the site produces a list of stations that have recently played a song by that artist, along with the song that is currently playing. Users can also view charts of the most popular artists across all radio stations (Madonna and The Beatles currently lead) and the most popular songs.
It’s a fun site to play around with and is well designed, but I question if it’s really any more helpful for finding a station I’d like than a standard list of stations sorted by genre. And because the engine is only using a single song to determine if I’d like a station, it tends to get a lot of false positives – it would be much better if I could enter a list of artists I like and find a station that has played all of them. Of course, Pandora already lets me build my own radio station by doing just that.
But no on is putting this radio in my car!
The URL is mispelled (onllama.com) in snapshots banner
Hey TechCrunchers, this is Jared from One Llama. Just wanted to encourage you to leave feedback here if you have any, we’d really like to know what users want to see out of the radio service. I think there’s lots of room to innovate in this space, and we’d like to explore it.
Cheers, -Jared
Kinda like it. the search works for me. Hope its a good long list of stations. Don’t know where your pooling these from, but so far it gets me where i need to go to hear a good variety. I like radio more than just songs sometimes. Thanks for the invite techcrunch.
Liked it too . Just searched for a ghazal singer and didn’t expect it return any results . To my amazement , 7 channels and awesomely good songs in the queue. Thanks for the invite !
Things i liked :
1.The Recently played thing which shows up as you moved your cursur above the channel
2.Quite simple
Considering this ?
. Everything and ANything has a user profile these days **
1.A user profile ? ** though i would be happy without it
2.I get back to the login or invite page as i hit the back button while i want to retrieve the older results
Eg : I hit the Search by artists and search for one
Channels appear
i select one and play
If i try to use to get back to the older options or results , i end up in the login page.
3.A login button at the http://www.onellama.com/
4.A suggest feature at the listing?.
If you type in the artist name together like ACDC , i dont get any results . SO is IronMaiden. But the AC DC and Iron Maiden gives me the channels i need
Thats it for now ..
Going to my favs
..Can you increase the invite limit , please 
I tried this service out a few days back. It really is quite impressive, and provides a nice variety. I would probably not ask that we could enter several artists, as that would possibly cause troubles in turning out more results. The only real complaint I have is that it wouldn’t work in Chrome. Feedback… perhaps a rating and tagging system, and maybe even a commenting system, could be implemented. Overall, I would say that though this may not become the primary place I go to listen to music, it will still remain on my list. By the way, I really like the Favorites Bar/Tray at the bottom. Great job. I look forward to seeing more of this site. =)
Jared,
Nice and simple. I can put up with the recent played. The group of stations are way cool. Different stuff on each yet somewhat related. I like changes. Thanks…
Jason , But Pandora is avaialable in US only right ?
Just a colsed beta!
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Domain name search tool
http://domain120.com
no wonder SIRI & XMSR are going under very quickly!
——
The Dean
collegestock@gmail.com
http://www.CollegeStock.com
Jared,
Very nice site, nice idea and well presented.. An idea to monetize without ads is to link the ‘recently played’ songs to Amazon with your referral id.
Diwant
Invites ran out a little faster than anticipated, we bumped in a few more invites for the stragglers coming in to read this =) Again, thanks for the feedback so far, we’re reading all of your ideas/questions/complaints and would love to see more.
I’ve been using http://www.stationportal.com/ to do this for a while now (like umm.. a year ago?)
It wraps a Digg-style interface around internet radio (you can vote, have friends, create your own custom groups of various stations, see what’s playing on your stations or on your friends stations, etc).
Using the search, it also shows what station last played a artist or song, what station played it the most, and has listings of what a specific station has last played. It shows what stations are playing NOW, and some tools to visually see them – the scroller is nifty, the map thing was better but doesn’t seem to be up right now (?). It lets people talk about a specific station, see what the station has played, etc. Also shows the album art of the last song played, and you can buy that last song from Amazon.
It seems to be more focused on what radio stations are doing than “top songs”- even though I’ve found the search VERY helpful in tracking down station that plays a band or song I like.
For example, the last station that played Nickleback was Radio ElectTracks. The station that has played it the most if 1.FM TOP 40 (460 times, last played 15 hours and 51 minutes ago)
The last station that played Hotel California was 181.FM (played 3 hours ago), and the station that played it the most is also 181.fm @ 209 times.
And I don’t think it ever in a closed beta…
(links to some of the above info)
http://www.stat...Name=Nickelback
http://www.stat...x?StationID=107
great service, am enjoying the offering…just love smooth jazz and now am able to listen while busy working.
Hmm, something’s not working for me. Started searching specialist dance artists like Claude Von Stroke, MIA and Diplo and nothing came up. So focused out to Jay Z, Coldplay and the supposedly top artist Madonna. Again “The llama roamed but found no artists by that name, please try again.”
Definitely a great concept, firmly believe in the insight that radio stations need to be unearthed and listeners need an easier way of navigating the fragmented landscape.
One thing I’d question though is whether search by artist can really be done at a station level or whether it should be at a “show” level.
My Name is The Dean (AKA Thomas J. the Gay McCarthy). I live with my parents and I’m a Liberal & Democrat and been living with my parents for the last 25 years. I know everything about nothing and everything I say is false, so don’t believe me!!! I still suck my mommies nipples!!