A New Kind of Music Box

I’m hooked on yet another free internet service. Thanks to my co-worker, Nate - a man with a vast knowledge of where surfing the net may take your board, if you will - I have discovered pandora.com.

“Create your own radio station,” it prompts. That only plays the music you want to hear. Commercial free.

Pinch me. I’m dreaming.

There has to be a catch. Well, in a way there is. You have to spend a minute or two to program it. You have to feed it a bit of the music that you like by entering the names of artists and songs you like. From there is where it gets cool. Pandora “reads” your song or artist’s style, then generates a playlist based on its music “genes.”

Now, at the venerable institution where I work, just this Friday will be a talk by one of the pioneers of the Human Genome Project. You know, the one that’s mapped human DNA?

The Music Genome Project, on the other hand, (from the website) came about like this:
“We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. 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.”

So what does that mean? It means, when I create a new “radio station” - and did I mention you can do this as many times as you like, and thereby have a different radio station for every mood? - and I title this new station, “Movie/TV Themes,” adding the theme to Mission Impossible as my first song, Pandora builds me a playlist that, within the first six tunes, includes the theme from the Six Million Dollar Man and the theme from Danger Man.

Cool, huh?

For other neat features and rules about how many songs you’re allowed to skip, how to fine-tune the playlist, discover new artists and ban some from your list forever, check out www.pandora.com.

Happy Listening!

5 Responses to “A New Kind of Music Box”

1. How cool is that! I feel the need for a little HOLLY JOLLY CHRSTMAS. I’ll see what that brings up.

   by Sara on November 29th, 2007 at 7:05 am
   
   

2. I think you could do a station for every holiday, or every month of the year - spooky Halloween music, a Beach Boys Extravaganza for the summer months…

   Not sure how much Beach Boys I can take in one sitting, though. Wonder what Surfin’ USA would lead to?

   by Regina Harvey on November 29th, 2007 at 8:07 am
   
   

3. Yahoo has been doing this for years - (and I support Yahoo because they support www.GoodSearch.com which donates money to charities for each search you do) - go to Yahoo music and you can create your own station - they also drop in songs and artists you might like, and with rating stars you can tell them how much you like something, or if it should never be played again, and the frequency of play corresponds to your ratings. There is a free service which has little ads (10 seconds) and a paid one which does more stuff (’don’t know the details as I just did the free one). I have found out about a lot of artists (new and old) and songs I liked but wasn’t aware of this way. Sadly, my home dial-up doesn’t support it and I no longer have an office computer (no office, either), so I’ve missed it terribly.

   by Kate Hathway on November 29th, 2007 at 11:14 am
   
   

4. Uh oh. I’m about to start geeking.

   Pandora is awesome. A great way to find new music.

   You might also want to look at Last.fm (http://www.last.fm), which instead of taking one song or artist and building a playlist from its database, it pays attention to what you’re listening to and offers suggestions based on that. Similar idea, different method.

   Unfortunately, it depends on a plug-in to an app like iTunes or Winamp, or whatever it is you use.

   Over the last year or so folks have been figuring out ways to link up the two services, so Pandora can get a seed from your info on last.fm and build stations through that.

   http://lifehacker.com/software/pandora/pandora-and-lastfm-get-together-164110.php

   Then there’s live365.com, which is a series of independent internet radio stations. I don’t know how the recent rulings on broadcast royalties have hit them, but last I checked there were people putting up all kinds of stations, from gospel holiday songs to Halloween music, to remixes of porn soundtracks (called, appropriately enough , Fluffertrax).

   Also, if you just want to take a chance and hear some random all over the place b-sides you might want to check out Radio Paradise (http://www.radioparadise.com), which is an independent station run out of Northern California and covers a lot of ground, most of it good.

   by Stephen Blackmoore on November 29th, 2007 at 11:15 am
   
   

5. Oh my - I’ve gotten in way over my head! Who knew there were so many choices? I’ll have to check out the Yahoo site too since I like the Good Search idea.

   Thanks you guys!

   by Regina Harvey on November 29th, 2007 at 11:34 am
   
   

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