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.