New Online Service: Introducing Jango

What do StumbleUpon and Jango have to do with each other? I have no idea outside of the fact that I enjoy listening to Jango while I stumble. This morning, for example, I’ve listened to David Lee Roth’s Yankee Rose, CCR’s Down on the Corner, the Eagles’ Hotel California, Glenn Miller’s In the Mood, Led Zeppelin’s Viva Las Vegas and more. Feel free to add me as a friend. I have rather eclectic music taste, everything from classics to classic rock and everything in between.

Here’s how it works. You put in the name of a group that you’re interested in. That group plus others with similar sounds comprise your first station. If you want to listen to something besides what’s playing on your stations, no problem. You can find most reasonably popular songs (although no Mannheim Steamroller (my favorite Christmas music)). I found The Unicorn by the Irish Rovers, but it’s the only song of theirs on the list. Jimmy Buffet looks like they copied his Greatest Hits album and only 2 Charlie Daniels songs. A decent selection of Rush songs (I’ve been a Rush fan forever). They’re supposed to be adding new songs though, so hopefully they’ll start adding more songs for those of us who enjoy a little of everything.

So, once you create a station, you can either select other groups that you want to belong to that station, or create new stations for different types of music. You can always go back and edit a station too, if you want to remove a group that you added accidentally.

Another feature that I only recently discovered, but really like, is the ability to influence which songs play on my stations. There are three faces right underneath the title of the song that’s playing. If I don’t like a song and click the frowning face, that song won’t play anymore. The normal smiley face will ensure that the song plays again, and the grinning face makes the song play often.

Finally, I don’t have to just listen to music that I picked out. If you’re wanting to listen to a song that’s not playing on your stations right now, you can tune into someone else’s station. Underneath the smiley faces, you can see a list of people who are listening to similar music. Click on one of them to hear what’s playing on their station, and then with your approval, Jango will send a thank you note once you’ve finished listening to their station.

A last quick note. If you use Flashblock, make sure you set Jango as an exclusion, otherwise it won’t work (learned from experience).