How do I clear songs and start my Yahoo! Music radio station over?

Question

Yahoo! MUSIC Radio Station

Answer 1

I gave this answer to someone who wanted to totally start over on their station. It sounds like that is what you want to do, too. It's a long answer, but maybe all you need is in the next 3-4 paragraphs.

#1 - If you want to wipe out all of your ratings and start over, you have to do them one at a time, but it goes more quickly than you might think. Even if you had 10,000 ratings, you could have them all deleted in an hour or so.

Here is the fast way to do it. In IE, go to music.yahoo.com and sign in. On the Launchcast Radio tab, go to "edit my station". When that page comes up, you will have a list of links on the left side of your page.

First, let's reset all your artists. Click on the Artists link. This brings up a list of your rated artists, sorted from highest to lowest. Launchcast shows you 20 at one time, and gives you a drop-down list so you can go to any group of 20. Go to your "last" artists. When they come up, double click on the rating widget for each artist. This causes the ratings for those artists to go away. Click "Previous 20". Repeat the procedure until all of your artist ratings are gone. You should be able to delete 100-200 ratings per minute. (I suggested going to the end and working backwards to make it easy to delete them all. Otherwise, if you delete the first 20 and then click next, Launchcast may reorder your list and you may end up skipping a screenful each time.)

Go back to your Edit Station page and repeat the procedure for Albums and Songs.

Finally, to reset your genres, go back to your Edit page and click on Genres. Here you will have to just work your way through all the genres looking for those you have rated. Reset them the same way, by double clicking on the widget. If this part takes longer than 2 minutes, I would be surprised.

Now you have a station with no ratings, ready for you to start your ratings anew.

#2- Here is a quick course in getting your station to play what you like:

Through ratings, tell LC what you want to hear. Don't spend a lot of time telling LC what you don't want to hear. LC doesn't handle a lot of negative ("Never Play") ratings real well.

Use the 4-star system or the 100 point system. Either works, but the 100-point system gives you finer control.

Be somewhat discriminating about the ratings you assign. Don't rate everything either 100 or Never Play. Try to think in terms of "do I want to hear this song more or less than average", or use the "Star" system of "It's just OK", "I like it", "I love it", and "can't get enough".

Your ratings tell LC how often you want to hear a song (artist, album, genre), not how good the song is. Those two things are similar but not identical. For example, I think Stairway to Heaven is a really good song but I've heard it so often in my life that I give it a low rating on my station. I don't want to hear it anymore.

Start off with a core of genre ratings. Rate 5-10 genres you particularly like and leave the rest blank.

Next, maybe look up your personal CD collection in Launchcast and rate the songs. The idea is to get you above 500 "quality" ratings quickly. If you like lots of different genres, make sure you rate CDs from each of the types of music you like.

Next, find some artists you like and listen to their fan station, rating each song as you hear it. You could also do this with the pre-programmed stations. This again builds up good ratings in areas you like.

If you want to look up artists you like and rate them, that is fine, but bear this in mind: When you give an artist rating, you are saying that you like everything by that artist equally. Often, that's not the case. It's OK to give high ratings to artists you really like, but I wouldn't give a medium or low rating to an artist where you just like a few of their songs.

I could go on and on (and already have). Good luck, and if you want any more tips or discuss rating strategies, give me a holler.