I don’t know how I missed this until now, but the Pandora Project is a very cool music recommendation service. I’ve been listening much more to Podcasts lately on my Nano and missing some new juice in the music department… Pandora is just what I need to track some new stuff – as well as stuff I know I already like.
With a simple selection of either an artist or song, you begin a personalized stream of music based on the qualities of that track. What comes next is interesting… Definitely not what you might expect – which is the idea! You can say whether you like or dislike things which of course further enables the recommendation engine.
The system runs in Flash via the browser, so as long as you have a decent connection you can get some good tunes flowing. Pandora could easily replace my iTunes Radio listening as well as the desire to login to Sirius for some tunes there. It’s nice to be more in control of the experience — especially when on a system that is not easily connected to my home collection.
The Pandora Project is a spawn of The Music Genome Project which as the site states:
On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.
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.
Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 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.
I’d say it’s a very successful experiment in my new and limited exposure to the system. I can already see the need / desire for plugins to work with iTunes that would allow me to carry this through a more localized application. I could also see an extension of this (with DRM of course) that would allow for programming of iPods in Podcast format, but by single track which would allow ratings to be tabulated and tracked back up so you could continue to get more and more refined selections.
I would definitely pay for the priviledge…
technorati tags: Pandora, Music Genome Project, Music, Personalization, iTunes, DRM