Ambient Internet Brain Goo

Anyone who isn’t running Apple’s iTunes is missing a chance to improve their quality of life (or is on Linux). Although I feel another flame over iTunes’ egregiously broken Web addressing coming on, this post is just an expression of wonder. I had iTunes quite a while before I opened up the “Radio” part of the menu, and here’s all these radio stations broadcasting nice no-charge music, many of them ad-free and in fact narrative-free. I am totally baffled by the business model, setting up one of these things must involve some nontrivial investment. For during dinner and when company’s over, I tend to select one of the “ambient” stations and let the sweet-sounding slow-moving audio cotton candy fill in the sonic gaps. Go back a few years and survey the prognosticators; I can’t remember anyone ever having predicted free endless ambient brain goo being a plausible use of the Global Information Superhighway. There you go. [Update: Kiran Jonnalagadda writes to tell me that the iTunes radio stations are the same as those you get at shoutcast.com, so WinAmputees and penguinistas using XMMS can already get ’em.]