Friday, May 26, 2006

Pandora is a neat site that helps you find new music to love. You give it a couple of artists you like, and it plays a customized streaming radio station for you filled with the music you said you liked and other music you might not have heard of. I gave it Peter Gabriel and Alanis Morrisette. It came back with David Bowie and late [i.e. recent] Cyndi Lauper. I'm a huge Bowie fan, so that was a pretty good guess. Instead of using an Amazon-style algorithm ("customers who liked Peter Gabriel's Passion soundtrack also bought the soundtrack to The Passion of the Christ"), it uses "genomics," attempting to identify the flavor of the music ("loose chord structure, syncopated beat").

Worth a listen.

9:08 AM

4 Comments:

Did Cyndi Lauper die and I miss it?

By  Lawrence, at 12:18 PM  

Last.FM is a similar service that is widely considered even slightly better than pandora.

Also, just today, there was a widelyr ead round-up of eight such services, including Pandora and Last.FM: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1967383,00.asp

By  Dan Abrams, AKA the man, at 12:36 PM  

http://www.last.fm/user/Webs-101

Viva Bernard Sumner!

By  Webs, at 2:36 PM  

alex, dan-
these sites rock.
the extremetech review was worthwhile.
you are gods.
thx,
-dkbrklyn

By  dkbrklyn, at 1:55 AM  

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