Pandora
Recently, I’ve been giving the Pandora music service a try. Originally I had briefly scanned a post by Steve Pavlina about it, but I didn’t really consider it much. I was pretty happy with iTunes and didn’t see what the difference from iTunes radio was.
Then I heard a podcast from Amber MacArthur and Leo LaPorte on Inside the Net where they interviewed Tim Westergren from the Music Genome Project. He explained how the service worked and how it was different than traditional streaming audio stations.
The Music Genome Project takes a song and ranks over 300 different musical “genes”. They rank things like the use of minor key, production quality and even the vibrato in the singer’s voice. All of these factors create a “DNA structure” for the song.
I surfed on over to Pandora to check it out. Pandora is really a flash application that streams music like a radio station. You select either a song or an artist and the stream plays other music with similar structures. You can tweak the stream by ranking songs as “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”, so it gives you an opportunity to tweak the parts of music that you like or find similar music. Ever since “No one knows” by Queens of the Stone Age came out, I’ve wanted to find songs just like it.
When I first signed up, I chose the song “Pull Me Under” by Dream Theater. Based on the heaviness in that song, Pandora chose “Snap your fingers, snap your neck” by Prong. I was impressed — I like both of those songs. My friend Steve will be appalled. He thinks Dream Theater is unequaled and Prong are talentless hacks. Nonetheless, the song structures are in the same vein.
The only drawback I see is the ability to see the criteria used and tweak the parameters manually. Knowing what makes a song you like could help you manually find more of the same. I created a radio station for KJ-52 and TobyMac, two Christian rappers. It found music similar in style but I would have rather been able to tweak the options for what I consider to be distasteful lyrical content. I did find some interesting things I didn’t consider, though. For example, Fates Warning is closer in style to Anthrax than it is Dream Theater.
The player will let you skip songs, but there is a limit to the number you can bypass. This is due to the licensing agreement Pandora must comply to as an online radio station.
Overall, its a very cool site. I haven’t found any new bands because of the stations, but that seems to be a function of the amount of music archived at this time. Perhaps as time goes on this will be a fantastic service.