Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

Sony music discovery feature strengthens Music Unlimited service

By | November 7, 2011, 7:00am PST

Summary: Sony’s Music Unlimited gets more feature-packed while trying to stay strong in the midst of digital music competition.

As the digital music subscription market heats up and gets more crowded, each service needs to find ways to not only please customers to the fullest extent but also stick out with new and more features all the time.

Sony is treating its Music Unlimited platform to a fresh update with the new music discovery function.

In theory, My Channels makes discovering new music easier for the user as well as enables subscribers to create and control customized radio stations built around a particular favorite artist.

My Channels achieves this by analyzing and categorizing musical traits of more than 10 million tracks available in the Music Unlimited content library worldwide. From there, it will automatically populate a station built around a favorite artist or band.

Actually some of these features sound reminiscent of amenities already available with other services. Pandora already skips songs to which you give a “Thumbs Down,” and Rhapsody has also recently played with new ways to enable listeners to find new music easier.

However, both of those services have been around for more than a few years, and Music Unlimited just debuted this year and is still growing. It’s actually exciting to see it getting more feature-rich this quickly.

Unfortunately — really for Apple fans — there are still a few kinks, including the fact that Music Sync (i.e. with iTunes for syncing playlists like on Spotify) still isn’t supported on Mac computers, nor has a Music Unlimited app arrived for iOS like it has for Android.

The update to the Music Unlimited application is available for Basic and Premium plan subscribers, and it is supported on the PlayStation 3, PCs, 2010 and 2011 connected Bravia HDTVs and Blu-ray Disc players, and home theater systems.

Related:

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Topics

Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.

Disclosure

Rachel King

Rachel King has no business relationships, affiliations, investments, or other potential conflicts of interest relating to the content posted in this blog.

Biography

Rachel King

Rachel King is a staff writer for CBS Interactive in San Francisco. Before serving as a contributing editor at ZDNet in New York City for two years, she previously worked for The Business Insider, FastCompany.com, CNN's San Francisco bureau and the U.S. Department of State. Rachel has also written for MainStreet.com, Irish America Magazine and the New York Daily News, among others. Rachel has a B.A. in Mass Communications and History from the University of California, Berkeley and a M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University, where she served as art director for the student magazine, Plated.

The discussion hasn’t started yet. Why don’t you begin it?

Formatting +
BB Codes - Note: HTML is not supported in forums
  • [b] Bold [/b]
  • [i] Italic [/i]
  • [u] Underline [/u]
  • [s] Strikethrough [/s]
  • [q] "Quote" [/q]
  • [ol][*] 1. Ordered List [/ol]
  • [ul][*] · Unordered List [/ul]
  • [pre] Preformat [/pre]
  • [quote] "Blockquote" [/quote]
ie8 fix

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox

Facebook Activity

White Papers, Webcasts, & Resources
ie8 fix