I have recently opened up Pandora’s Box… and so far, wonderful things have come out of it!

A project was started a while back, I really can’t find out exactly when, called The Music Genome Project. Modeled after the Human Genome Project, but of course involving music, the project constantly strives to acquire many different kinds of songs, artists, albums and analyze these songs using hundreds of different variables. The people running this project have a huge library of music and seem inclined to continue the experiment by letting the web-community create “stations” of music they love using this gigantic library.

Pandora is the result and, WOW, I love it! Essentially, the site is a Flash page that, when you first visit, asks you for a song or artist (or band) that you like. If you give a song, due to current laws they can’t play the song you input, but it will play a similar selection. From there, a “station” is created with that sonic variable(s) as a starting point. As a song plays, you have the option of giving a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. If it’s down, the site will play a different song and artist for you to try. The program stores your choices of what you like, and don’t like, to hear and makes adjustments to its choices accordingly. Also, you can edit the station and add other artists and songs in styles that you feel would contribute to the station’s overall sound.

So far, I’ve made four visits to the site. The first was to try it out. You don’t need an account to try it; as far as I could tell, you can try it many times. My second visit, I opened a free account (Yes! It’s free! (but with ads on the page)) and made my current station, Symphony of Power, since I’ve been on quite the power metal kick. These first two visits were a series of me selecting thumbs up, down, down, up, down, up, down… you get the idea. During my third visit, I found myself adding more bands (I started with Sonata Arctica) that I knew, and also was encountering thanks to Pandora’s library. The thumbs up were becoming more frequent, as the programming was selectively weeding out music that, from my thumbs down selections, I was indicating that I didn’t want to hear. Today is my fourth visit. Out of 26 songs, which is the most I’ve listened to on any visit, I only disagreed with 4 choices. Not a bad learning curve for a piece of web software!

Well, I’m on my 27th song, a selection from Scorpions Unbreakable album called “Deep and Dark”. For songs that I like but may not fit what I consider the station profile, I won’t give a thumb up or down. I’ll see what happens down the line. I think this is a great idea for internet radio! Not quite request-based, but you still control much of how the music you hear is selected. Uh oh… live Dream Theater just came on and I’m now in heaven. To all music lovers, you owe it to yourself to check out this site. You’ll be glad you did!

You can visit my Pandora profile page by clicking this sentence. To listen to my Pandora station, just click the station, Symphony of Power, featured in my profile.
Cheers… and happy listening!

Tags: Music Listening, Internet Radio, Music, Radio

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Around the Web, Music, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.