1:29 am // Sunday 13 December 2009
Easily Create an Internet Radio Show With New MySpace Music

Ever wanted to have your own radio show where you play your favourite tunes and talk a little about each track? Fancy yourself as the next Casey Kasem, John Peel or even Howard Stern? With the new playlisting functionality on MySpace you can do just that very easily. The key reason is that whilst some other music services allow you to playlist, none are so easy to add your own spoken links to as MySpace. Plus on MySpace you have access to all the major back catalogues as well as indie and unsigned music… if you’re in the US, the UK, Australia or New Zealand.

Step-by-Step Instructions

  1. Log in to MySpace and create a new playlist in ‘My Music’. Go to music.myspace.com and search for songs, albums or artists. You can drag tracks from search results into your playlists on the right-hand side or go to the artists’ profiles and add songs there.
  2. If you’re using a Mac (if not, why not?) fire up GarageBand and select the podcasting preset. If you’re on a PC go and get Audacity for free and set it up to record.
  3. Once you’ve recorded each link you need to add some compression to make it sounds a little more polished. You then need to seperate and export each link as an mp3 file. Call them link1.mp3, link2.mp3 etc.
  4. Create a new account on MySpace, taking care to select the ‘band’ type profile on the first page of the signup process. Upload up to 10 of your spoken links. If you need more you’ll have to create further accounts. I have two accounts for this and find it managable. Note: Make sure you tick ‘Allow users to add songs to their profile’ on the page where you upload and manage your songs.
  5. Sign back into MySpace as yourself and visit the dummy profiles you set up. Add your spoken link tracks one by one to the playlist you created by clicking the ‘+’ next to each track (if there is no ‘+’ see the previous point in red). Then go to ‘My Music’ and re-order the tracks in your playlist so the links are in the right places in relation to the songs you added earlier.
  6. Once you’ve edited the order of the playlist so it hangs together as a little radio show, on that same page you can give the playlist a title and description. This helps put it in context and show up in search results.
  7. Last step is to share with friends. Go to the playlist page and use the ‘Share’ options or just send the link round. Anyone can receive and play the playlist in full, even if they’re not on MySpace.
  8. Oh, forgot, one more step. Bask in the glory of being the world’s raddest music DJ!!

Have fun and share your playlists in the comments below. Mine can be heard here.

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