Wednesday, August 24, 2016

The Free Curated Music Service 'Radiooooo' Lets You Discover Music from Any Country Over a Century


The free and curated music service Radiooooo.com lets you discover and stream music from any country over a century. The initial idea for the project came to Benjamin Moreau when he drove his father's classic French sportscar:


In 2012, Benjamin Moreau, an artist and d.j., was test-driving his car-collector father's most recent acquisition, a white 1966 Renault Caravelle, in the French Riviera. "As we drove along this road, lost in time, my fingers came across the splendid old radio on the exquisite wooden dashboard," he recalled. When Moreau switched it on, the speakers belched "a wave of awful commercial music," he said, "instantly bursting the time bubble we were so happily swimming in." The moment led to an idea: what if you could organize music, not based on genre or complex algorithms but instead as a part of time and space? What if, instead of scrolling through artists and songs arranged alphabetically, you could explore them historically and geographically?


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Radiooooo employs curators who spend hours every day combing through hundreds of submissions from almost thirty thousand contributors, from all over the world (Troubat refers to them as "treasure hunters"). The curators make sure the audio files are high quality, and judge whether or not the song fits the Radiooooo aesthetic, which can be difficult to define. For Moreau, the decisions about which music to include are instinctive, and "the music is only selected based on how we feel when we start listening to a track. The ability of a song to touch us instantaneously, in a completely subjective way. I would almost say in a naive way . . . We are not trying to apply ethno-musical criteria. We are keeping what we believe are true musical treasures." Troubat told me that the strength of the editorial line leaves lots of good music, about ninety per cent of submissions, out of the collection.


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