What happens when you turn a radio on?
Sound comes out. Then you pick the sound you want.
Radios are silence-suckers, not sound-creators.
I find it weird that a lot of Internet radio and music apps and services (and even products like iPods) go the other way; silent when you start them, causing you to select the music you want, before getting any sound out of it. In some ways it’s the optimal interaction design, or at least it’s the most rational, but I think there’s something nice in just starting and letting you guide it into what you want.
It’s certainly a different way of looking at interactions from the traditional action-reaction flows that seem to dominate computers and technology.
There’s an option on the last.fm client to make it start playing the last station it was ‘tuned’ to as soon as you start the app. Which is a bit more like what you’re describing. It’s not the default however.
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