As the myth goes, opening Pandora’s box was kind of a bad thing. Opening Pandora’s site, on the other hand…a damn good thing.
I frequent so many tech/trend sites (digg, LifeHacker, Slashdot, Engadget, etc.) so I was rather surprised that Pandora had slipped under my radar. Fortunately, I work closely with college students, and not much that is techy, trendy, or flat-out cool slips under their radar.
Pandora is a killer Flash app that is an offshoot of the Music Genome Project, a brilliant database that categorizes the fundamental qualities of a vast number of songs—”everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony.”
You type in a song or artist that you like, it queues up a list of songs with similar qualities and streams them to your computer in their entirety. You can further nudge the app into offering up better suggestions. Everyone I have seen use this thing (myself included) is amazed at what a great job Pandora does at suggesting songs that appeal to an individual’s tastes—even my own eclectic tastes.
Many of the suggested songs were by artists I had never heard of before. You can just leave this thing playing for hours in the background. You can have up to one hundred suggestion lists (“stations”) at a time.
One immediate drawback is that my expanded exposure to artists I like will result in many more impulsive “Buy Album” clicks at the iTunes Music Store.
(BTW, Pandora asks for registration info after about an hour of hassle-free listening. Their privacy policy seemed reassuring enough, though, for me to sign up straight away.)
Interesting. Now that I work with techinically unsaavy kids I was unaware of several of the sites you mentioned. They look pretty interesting. I also gave the Pandora site a short tryout. It was very interesting to see how it tried to match me up with different artists, although I was a little surprised by some of the choices. Apparently I’m secretly a late-1990s San Francisco goth… (Switchblade Symphony seemed to be one of their better matches.)
Technically unsavvy? Interesting, Rob. I guess I just have this image of Japanese youth as being cutting edge/hi-tech (Mecha in the basement, Chobitsu in the closet, ketai in one hand, PSP in the other). I guess maybe not so much in rural Japan (or in the real world).
I have been listening to a great deal of Techno/Trance music with Pandora. Good stuff.
Technically unsavvy? Surprisingly so. Everyone above 14 seems to have a keitei (and they do rock here), and a lot of the boys like video games. Nevertheless, few of them seem to have computers at home or spend time on the internet. This seems strange to me, since ideo games were what got me interested in computers. (Of course, purists might argue that my Atari 800 really was just a video game console with a keyboard…)
P.S.-I am sorry for the horrid quality of my previous post. Must-not-blog-just-before-bed…