Another magical thing from One Golden Square Labs has just surfaced: Compare my radio.

It’s yet another comparison site. But this time, it’s not for car insurance, or, indeed, for small mammals from the mongoose family. It’s for music radio.

Last.fm tells me that I am a fan of The Beatles, The Eels, and the Divine Comedy. Compare My Radio tells me that The Beatles are most played on Absolute Classic Rock; that NME Radio has a particular penchant for The Eels; and that the Divine Comedy’s natural home is BBC 6 Music. I would never have thought of listening to NME Radio, it should be said, for the type of music I’m into. Good work, CompareMyRadio.

What’s more interesting is the website’s comparison of some of the radio stations. No surprise that Heart in London, and Heart in the East Midlands, share 96% of their playlist. More interesting that Absolute Radio and Rock Radio share 66% of theirs; and I find it, as a non-music programmer, quite interesting that XFM and NME Radio in London are poles apart: sharing only 27% of their playlists. And it’s all done with a rather lovely user interface – including the delightfulness of sparklines. Yay for sparklines! ;)

This is a brave move by Absolute Radio, the company behind this new website. It’s carefully not branded by Absolute; indeed, as my figures show, it’s not recommending the main Absolute Radio service to me at all. Doubtless it’ll ruffle feathers – while it’s using open data, I’ll bet some stations won’t be particularly pleased about their playlists being dissected in this way (though they’d be mad to complain, it should be said).

It would, of course, be better if the service was able to recommend me a radio station by looking at my last.fm profile or my iTunes library data, rather than individual artists. And, given that many programmes on BBC Radio run very different music policies, it might be nice to split this data to programme level (though that’s made rather more difficult to do because radio stations have to date been pretty poor at sharing programme data in an open way).

Notwithstanding that, this is a really interesting piece of work into the output of the UK’s major radio stations – stations that between them are listened-to by over 50% of the population. One Golden Square Labs should, once more, be congratulated.

Of course, I’m reminded of the work that the BBC did in this area over a year ago (during the ‘Mashed!’ hack weekend). Testing the recommendation service, I punched in my last.fm profile, and the information that came back was that I might rather enjoy the Russell Brand show on BBC Radio 2. If only I could have enjoyed the purile rubbish that came between the songs…

(Full disclosure: most of Golden Square Labs worked for me at one stage, and are friends of mine; and I saw Compare My Radio before general release, and told them to put a ‘listen to’ button in there. They have. Hurray.)

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