www.musicovery.com is home to a rather cool piece of gadgetry:  An interactive web radio.  However, unlike other web radios which only offer the user access to free music, Musicovery blends this with a funky and addictive interface.

The interface comprises two parts.  To the left of the screen is a familiar and intuitive panel from which the user can set which type of music they wish to hear.  Setting the type of music can be set to a high level of specificity or to play everything and anything.

The user can: choose a particular year, decade, or specified timescale from which to hear songs; They can choose whether the songs that are played have been hits or not; A choice of four ‘moods’ – energetic, positive, calm, and dark – can be blended, to whittle down the track selection; and most specific of all, the user can select all, many, or one genre of music.

As the user is making their selection, the player will automatically start playing a song that matches the specified criteria.  The user can then turn to the second part of the interface - the song selection area.  This is immediately intuitive and easy to use.  You simply click on the song you want and it plays, and on a fast internet connection, it plays straight away without any stoppages halfway through the track to wait on it downloading.

After clicking on a track, the branch-like structure of the player randomly changes and offers up a new track listing.  If left alone, it will continue to play each song which appears along the path of the branches, but if the user clicks on another track, the braches rearrange, and there is a new track list created.

Across the whole range of genres, there are a lot of tracks.  However, I listened to it for a whole day with the genres metel, rock, and electro selected, and many of the tracks repeated.  It would be nice to think that over time the depth of songs and albums will increase.

Another slight downside to Musicovery is that, to gain access to the HiFi quality tracks, there is a subscription fee.  But at 9.99€ for 12 months, its not really a bank breaker.

At the very least, Musicovery can be used as a means to hear new songs and artists before shelling out for a CD or paying for a download.  Both these options can be linked to directly from the player.  At the bottom of each track on the “branches”, there links to both Amazon and iTunes.  Clicking on either of these links takes the user to the respective site and to the album from which the chosen song features.