Sony Wants to Satisfy Your Qriosity

"The service, called "Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity," will initially be available in the U.K. and Ireland, but Sony plans to expand it to more countries in 2011. It expects to add at least Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, New Zealand and the U.S. next year."

Look out Pandora!  Watch out Last.fm!  Sony is coming for you!  Well, maybe.  Qriosity is a new service to be offered by Sony that offers music streaming.  Supported on various Sony (Surprised?) devices, it looks like it will offer music not just from Sony, but several other record companies.  Aside from the obvious vendor lock-in and lack of ability to save your music for offline listening, one thing that is not mentioned is whether the service offers automatic playlist generation. 

I believe that one of the reasons why Pandora and Last.fm are so popular is because they make customized stations to listen to catered to your own tastes.  If Qriosity does not include that, it will be a serious advantage for its competitors.  Access to over 6 million songs is great, but without any way to organize and listen to what you want in that 6 million can become quite a challenge.

Of course, that does remind me of the hours, or even days, I would spend as a teenager making mix-tapes.  I guess those days are largely gone and we have decided to let technology do our mixing for us.