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Critical Review II
LAUNCH http://launch.yahoo.com/
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| I came to this site from yahoo! music when I was trying to listen to one of my favorite artist's songs.
As I explore the site, I found that this site provide a variety of services that relate music. |
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| The purpose of this site is to create "the premier music destination by providing music fans with the broadest array of music and music-related editorial content." The service provides audience with streaming audio, music videos, artist features and music news. Also, the audience can create custamized internet radio station. The service lets the audience find and listen to the music they like whenever they want. You can see the music video free or if you want to buy the CD, clicking 'BUY' button takes you to the yahoo! shopping site. |
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| The design of the site is pretty organized despite of a lot of information and functions it contains. I see it follows RobinWilliams' four principles of design. For instance, there are size contrasts between big images and small captions. Repetition of boxed with same font anc colors organize each page. The navigation bar that looks like folder-tabs reapeatedly appears on every page. All left-aligned texts and proximity difference between lines also organize each page. All fonts used in this site are san sherif, whose quality I think fit the content. |
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| Launch is a site where there is music or music videos to download. As I mentioned earlier, I visited this site to download music, and I was happy to see music videos of my favorite artists. However, the quality of the videos are not as satisfying. We can choose either Windows Media Player or Real Player to play the videos, and both let us see them on full screen size. But the download process takes time (with my 56k modem), and the images are blur and still. The sound is not high quality, as you hear the sample below. |
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| The audience of this site is people who like music. In its corporate overview page, Launch states that this site covers "all genres of music," I think the audience demographics ranges from teenager to middle-aged adults. Actually, it covers variety of genres such as country, clues, new age, raggae and world music, although I didn't find 'classic' genre. The majority of the audience may be young generation who likes popular music, since the site strongly features pops, rocks, raps and R&B's. |
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| The site includes many images of the musicians, which I think makes the audience happy to see their favorite artists' picture while they reading the information or listening to the music. The images also attract the audience's attention and let them know what content they can see with captions under the photo. The animated texts on 'spotlight' section also attract audience and emphasize the speciality. Music video and sound are important feature elements for this site. If it doesn't have these elements, I don't think it's worth visiting site, because I think the main feature in this site is that we can see music videos. |
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Sample: One-Nine-Nine-Nine |
| To download music is even less satisfying process, because there are 7 songs to download under each genre of music. To play the music, there are only two softwares; Liquid or WMR( I don't know what this stands for). When I chose liquid, it took me to the site to download the software. When I chose WMR, the site cannot found.
The radio station seems good service, but actually, the sound doesn't played continuously. It stops every 10 seoconds. |
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