Those of us who aren’t living in a country lucky enough to have Spotify are still on the lookout for the ideal streaming radio app. Most services that let you have any say in the songs that play charge you a monthly fee. Others, like Pandora, merely let you guide the stream in a vague direction based on your personal interests.
Jelli is a new player in this category with a novel idea: vote-driven live radio. Keep reading to see what exactly this is, how it works and whether you should try it.
Tuning In
When you first launch the app you’ll be asked to sign up for the Jelli service. Like the app, this is completely free and you may be already signed up if you’re familiar with the Jelli web service.
After you sign up, you’ll be taken to a horizontal menu of stations. Unfortunately, you don’t have many options to choose from. I was given thirteen stations ranging from classic rock to country, some even had no set genre and were free to play anything.
The Jelli station tuner
As you can see, the station preview shows you what’s currently playing. Tapping on the little information icon in the lower right of a station preview will show you the last four songs streamed to further help you get a feel for the personality of that particular choice.
Voting and Listening
Once you choose a station, tap on the play button to begin streaming the current song. From here you can get a glimpse of the song name and album art, contribute to the Rockometer (more on that later) or tap “Vote” to see a list of other songs.
Current song (left) and the song poll (right)
Here comes the interesting part, the list of songs you see above isn’t so much a queue as a poll. Users currently listening to Jelli decide what song will be played next by scrolling through the list and voting for their favorites.
Songs are then ranked by their score and the song with the most votes will be played next. Every time a new song starts, you get a new opportunity to cast your votes and influence the order.
Searching
Jelli doesn’t limit you to the songs currently shown on the charts. You can use the integrated search feature to find specific artists and/or songs that you want to start voting up for future play.
You can search and browse by artist or song
The Rockometer
The fun doesn’t end with simple yes or no votes. There are other layers added to the “game” to make it more interesting. One of these layers is the “Rockometer”, which allows users to voice their opinions about the currently playing song by tapping the thumbs down or horns gesture.
You tell Jelli whether the current song sucks or rocks.
The little meter above the hand icons shows the current state of the Rockometer, in other words, what listeners think of the currently playing song. If the Rockometer gets too far towards the “Sucks” side, the song is immediately pulled and the next highest ranked song begins.
Rockets and Bombs
In addition to the Rockometer, each user gets a limited number of Rockets and Bombs, each of which has a unique outcome. The bomb is simple, throw it and it destroys a song’s score enough to plummet it to the bottom of the list, which greatly reduces the likelihood of it getting played.
Rockets and Bombs give you more voting power
The Rocket is a little more unique. Rocketing a song boosts it up in the rankings, but not necessarily all the way to the top. If the community likes your rocketed song enough that it gets played, you get credit for it.
When I successfully rocketed a Blind Melon song to the top, there was an audible announcement about how a new user had submitted the song and my user name appeared next to the song as it played.
Will My Songs Really Get Played?
Jelly presents a really interesting way to listen to music. It’s like crowd sourcing a DJ position. The app makes good on its promise of content that is truly controlled by the users. The application might guide the content to a degree, but user votes have the ultimate say.
At this point you’re no doubt wondering how much one person can really affect the outcome of a station. Fortunately, it seems that you can currently influence it quite a bit! The active Jelli community is small enough that, in my testing, most of the high-ranking songs only had around three votes. This means that my one vote had a significant effect on the rankings.
As I listened, I genuinely felt like I had a voice in what was being played. Songs that I voted for were frequently played and I even successfully rocketed a song to the top as we saw above.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, I really enjoyed using Jelli. It’s an innovative idea and I think there’s a lot more room for this kind of thinking in the area of radio.
However, my impression of the app wasn’t all positive. For one thing, the interface really turned me off. For whatever reason, it just didn’t resonate with me and often felt cluttered. I would honestly love to see it completely redesigned from the ground up so that it’s more subtly styled like Rdio.
Also, as I stated before, there were very few stations to choose from. This might not be so bad if the stations were defined a bit better and organized in a new way, but the current system is vague and leaves you guessing.
The bottom line though is that it’s a free app that genuinely provides a cool new way to interact with streaming music. There’s definitely no reason not to download Jelli and let us know what you think!