I do love a good app, and one of the ones that has crept into my repertoire recently is TuneIn. It is the mobile version of a website that I quite frankly never even knew existed.
The app (and its website counterpart) let you pick a radio station from a huge list and just “tune in”. But radio is a declining medium right? Wrong. The online radio industry is blossoming – whilst applications on your computer such as Spotify may be able to pluck up some random song from a playlist I never quite think it’s the same.
I like the fact that a human presenter has picked a song, and I like variation in my songs. When I’m typing away at an essay it’s quite useful to have someone choose what I’m listening to, otherwise I could easily spend 30 minutes or so picking the right song, from the right album, by the right artist; not so productive.
I’ve also, recently, developed a love of local radio stations, and TuneIn lets me listen to the more obscure as well as the likes of Radio 1 and 6music. I’d never tuned into Llandudno’s community radio station Tudno FM before I discovered TuneIn.
Like most modern apps TuneIn has a free version and a paid for “pro” version. There are minor differences between the two version, the paid for version – costing a whopping 61p (on Google Play) lets the user record their shows and listen back at a later day.
Both free and paid pro version, let you search around the world for a specific song, not something I’ve personally done much but I did search Psy’s Gangnam Style at one point just to look at how much of a global phenomenon it was.
All in all I definitely like TuneIn, in fact I’m definitely a fan of the “utility” and “productivity” style app or website. Something that seems to present itself as having a use as opposed to the ridiculously addictive game type of app.
