Posted on Monday, May 19th, 2014 by Will Hagle
Cubic.fm is a crowd-sourced radio platform featuring music that suits your mood and location, streamed from Deezer or Rdio and curated by fans.
Cubic.fm connects with Deezer and/or Rdio to create better music recommendation services than those applications offer. 
The company has plans to work with additional streaming sites like Spotify, Xbox, Rhapsody and Wimp in the future, but for now you’ll have to set up a (free) account on Deezer or Rdio if you don’t already have one. While the “discovery” or music recommendation sections of many streaming services are bogged down with algorithms that fail to accurately predict what music you’ll like based on your past listening habits (or by the listening habits of your friends with similar taste), cubic.fm’s recommendations are more personal. The service, which cubic.fm describes as “crowd-sourced radio,” as it lets people contribute songs to a playlist that’s oriented around a particular mood and/or genre.
When you first arrive at cubic.fm, the site determines the weather and other key information about your location. You then select what you’re doing (i.e., “concentrating,” “chilling after work,” “brainstorming,” “chatting over cocktails,” etc.). This is similar to “The Sentence” that was an integral part of Beats Music’s launch, although the choices are more limited. 
Once you select a playlist that matches your mood, Cubic.fm then immediately begins playing songs that fit that theme. Each time a new song plays, information about the person who submitted the track is displayed. It’s easy to share the community-created playlists, and you can also subscribe to your favorite ones. Users can also follow each other to track their music-listening activity. There are tons of playlists offered on cubic.fm, both created by users and created by the company itself. Since the site pulls from streaming services with well-established catalogues, the music is high-quality and enjoyable. The simple inclusion of the human element of music discovery to cubic.fm’s platform makes the service so much better than the streaming companies with which it works.
