Pandora - Finally Something That Works

A while back, I tried the Yahoo! radio. It was new in the sense you listen to the songs rate each one on a scale of 1-5. The more you rate, the more Yahoo! radio will play songs according to your taste which it determines from your rating - just 3 words - "it does not work." Ok, 4 words :p

Today, I came across Pandora. It does the same thing, but this time it works. WOW. The Music Genome Project is such a natural thing that it's brilliant. Kudos to the folks behind it!

You begin by entering an artist or a song name. I said Good Charlotte. And it started pumping out music. I “educated” it a bit, telling it that I also like Metallica, Linkin Park and a few others. As it threw amazing tunes at me, I could give them thumbs up or thumbs down.

In less than an hour, this thing had me dialed. Here is a sampling of some of the music it picked for me that I had never heard of before:

• I Stay Awayby Alice In Chains
• Life Goes On by LeAnn Rimes
• Your Mistake by Sister Hazel
• When Love Was The Only Thing by Kin Fox
• No such thing by John Mayer

You can also do really cool things like click on a song and make a whole new station that is inspired by just that one song. At one point I selected the “Why did you play this song?” menu item. It said something like this:

Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features a subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentional, major key tonality and acoustic rhythm guitars.

Another time, during a nice instrumental rock/metal tune, I asked again and it said:

Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features basic rock song structures, a suble use of vocal harmoney, mild rhythmic syncopation, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation and a vocal-centric aesthetic.

Yup... now I know exactly what my music taste is. Its whatever's in the block quote above. Oh, and you can listen to stations that your friends create, if you know their email address.