Pandora

Several days ago, my college age daughter introduced me to Pandora. Anyone who enjoys music should check into this incredible website. The site is the result of the Music Genome Project, an assembly of musical attributes or "genes" that make music similar or dissimilar. From the Pandora website:

"Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. 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.

Since we started back in 2000, we've carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world."

The Pandora site does for music what Neflix does for movies (ever notice how Netflix suggests films you might like based on your prior rental history?) This is much the same.

More on Pandora from Wikipedia.

People's National Radio had an interesting piece on the Pandora and Netflix algorthims. Find the sound file Here.

Check it out. You won't be disappointed.