Music Genome
I have know about Pandora.com for a couple of months, but never really invested time in it till I put windows on my mac and didn’t feel like transferring music files. So I spent a good couple of days listening to music and creating stations. I didn’t realize how it worked till today, and I was amazed. Way back in 2000 or so the founders of the site started their music genome project attempting to catalogue thousands of songs based on their ‘genes’. They specified around 400 particular characteristics that were completely independent from artist, genre, popularity, and listener data. The founders manually assessed over 400,000 songs and compiled them into pandora, and they continually add songs to their genome. It is great to look at a song that is playing and click the ‘why was this song selected?” button and see that it says,
“Based on what you have told us so far, we are playing this track because it features mellow rock instrumentation, punk influences, folk influences, mild rhythmic syncopation and twelve eight time”
Not only is this totally awesome but so incredibly accurate and comprehensive. Now with last.fm and other sites you can find lots of great music based on people with similar tastes, genre, ect. but with pandora you are continually bombarded with excellent songs you would have trouble finding any other way. I know I have a massive and extensive itunes library (over 20k songs), not to brag or anything, but it gets hard to figure out what to choose and the fact that you don’t know what song is going to play next adds such a great effect to the music, like listening to vinyl. I have found several bands in the course of just the past day or so that I never would have known about or even considered listening to. You should check it out, turn off itunes for a day or so and create a few stations, specify songs you like or dislike and see what you get.
