Pandora
One of my co-workers introduced me to this really cool website called Pandora. It’s a music/radio site that customizes it’s playlist based on the preferences you indicate. To create a list, you can enter an artist like Kutless (my personal favorite), and it will generate a “radio station” with music that sounds like Kutless. So it will play other artists in the same genre or with the same style.
To customize the lists, you get to tell the app whether you like a song or not. If you don’t, it’s removed from the playlist, and then they won’t play it any more. If you like it, the list is further customized with additional music that has attributes similar to the song you’ve rated. There’s also a place to find out why the system added a particular song to your list. Click “Why did you play this song?” And it will spit out it’s logic something like this
Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features basic rock song structures, a subtle use of vocal harmony, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, major key tonality, and electric guitar riffs.
or maybe
Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features hard rock roots, a subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, a vocal-centric aesthetic and minor key tonality.
How does it know? Apparently, it’s all based on the Music Genome Project, which was a project designed to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level.” So each song is characterized using over 400 different attributes to describe each song.
It must have been a really tedious project to have people sit there and listen to music and “map out” each song’s “genome.” Apparently, that’s a process that takes 20-30 minutes per song. Wow! I can hardly imagine.
The down side is that it has some attributes of radio: you cannot listen to a song over again. You can’t even rewind a little bit. I guess it’s against their licensing restrictions. Fortunately, you can pause, and you can skip a song. Though, skipping a song also has it’s limitations. At one point, I skipped “too many” songs and it said it was couldn’t let me skip any more songs because there’s an hourly limit on how many songs can be skipped. Oh well. That’s a small price to pay for listening to all the other great songs.
Anyways, check it out and start listening to your own customized “radio” stations.