A Gift for the Masses

Since there is no longer any need to pimp my latest romance novel thanks to Harrogate. I come instead with a gift for the masses -- Pandora. Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project. This project is basically breaking down music into "genes." Lifting directly from their website: Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Pandora is the free (at least so far) internet radio arm of the project. You select a song or artist that you like and it creates a "station" based on the "genes" of that song. It also allows you to give thumbs up or down to songs, ban songs from the station for a month, play a song more, add more types of music to the station, or create multiple stations. It does eventually require registration with an email but it is free (again so far). You can also check why it picked a certain song and it will give you a short explanation based on the genes. Its worth trying out just to peruse their descriptions.

I've only recently tried it out and have had varying results. I created a station for Alabama 3 (known to the masses as "those guys who did the Sopranos theme song) and thought the "genes" worked really well. In the space of a half hour, I had found a number of bands who didn't necessarily sound like Alabama 3 but were bands I a) enjoyed and b) more importantly, never heard of.

I was impressed both by the range of music available (not once did I find myself listening to some Billboard hack) and the technology that puts the songs together.

I encourage everyone to try it out but be warned, mileage may vary.