Get Your Own Radio Station with Blip.fm

Blip.fm is a free service where you can post music from around the net. You type in your favorite artist or song and it does a search through social networks like Youtube, Imeem and more. If Last.fm is like a musical MySpace, Blip.fm is kind of a Twitter clone for music lovers.

I’ve been a Blip.fm DJ since May, and I’m very happy with the service. To be honest, I only started blipping about a month ago. If you sign up for an account and blip just one track, you officially have a radiostation! Check out mine at blip.fm/danielku.

You can choose a song by clicking on “Blip” on one of the results, then add a message like, “That’s classic, love this song from Daft Punk, take a listen”. Blip.fm can auto-post your blips to Twitter every time you blip a song. You only have to add your Twitter account details in the settings.

A blip is a combination of 1) a song and 2) a short message that accompanies it. The way you create a blip is to first search for a song that you want to hear (or a song that you want your listeners to hear), then add a short message (under 150 characters), finally you submit it. Submitting a blip is also referred to as “blipping”, so from here on out, when you read “he blipped my favorite track” it means “he submitted a blip that had my favorite song attached.” (Blip.fm FAQ).

If you click on the “Public” button you see the newest blips in real time without having to refresh your browser. This also lets other people see your blips, and if they like them they can favorite your song, buy it on Amazon or iTunes, give you props for it, or reblip your track through buttons in the right bottom corner of every blip.

If someone gives you props for a song, you can give someone else props for a song, or even the person that gave you props. But you can only give three props a day to each person. If you add a DJ to your favorites they appear on your Home section, where you see which songs your favorite DJ’s blip. You get listeners from time to time, which you can compare to followers on Twitter. You get badges on your avatar when you reach 100 listeners, 250 listeners, 500 listeners and so on. So far I have 17 listeners.

On Blip.fm props are tokens of respect that can be given from one DJ to another – say for blipping a good song or being a good DJ in general. Everyone starts with 10 credits that they can use to give props to other DJ’s. As you earn props from the community, your props will increase and so will the credits you have to give. 1 props earned = 1 credit in your bank. The number of props you’ve earned can only go up, but the credits you have goes down as you use them throughout the site. (Blip.fm FAQ)

If you like to take your music with you, there is an iPhone app for Blip.fm called “Boombox Pro” which costs maybe like $3 (I use the Swiss store so I’m not sure). You can add your Blip id and start searching and blipping music on the go.

In my opinion has Blip.fm a really good way to promoting your own music, finding new music and getting inspiration. It’s the radio of the future.