Want to discover new music? Been listening to the same genre - or even the same bands - for years? The Music Genome Project will rock your socks.
For five years, the geeks at the Music Genome Project have been meticulously creating a database of commercial music in which every song has hundreds of attributes - details about the vocals, the beat, the tempo, everything. Artists also have entries which record the attributes that characterize their music. It's the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.
So far this might not sound too exciting unless you're a musicologist. Sure, it's good to have a database that can tell me things like "The music of The Postal Service features electronica influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, a vocal-centrist aesthetic, major key tonality and prominent use of synth". But geez guys, I could have told you that anyway. No, what really makes the Music Genome Project exciting is the addition of something called Pandora.
Pandora is described by its creators as a 'music discovery service', and it does exactly what it says on the tin. Pandora is a web-based software tool that begins by asking you for the name of a song or artist that you're fond of. It then accesses the Music Genome Project's massive database to discover what the musical qualities of the song or artist are, and creates a playlist of musically similar material. It then plays it to you over the internet. For free.
The interface of Pandora is smoooooth. You can minimize it to a small browser window which displays the currently playing track, the last few played tracks, and links to various features and information. By entering a track or artist you like, you created what Pandora calls a "Station" - effectively, it displays each playlist as a radio station customized to your desires. You can have up to one hundred stations, at which point you have to delete one to get more (if, like me, you've experimented with some embarrassing artists, this won't be difficult).
Another great thing about Pandora is that unlike many free ways to get music over the internet, it's 100% legal so long as you're a resident of the United States (a US zip code is required upon creating an account, although this is open to abuse). The music industry is starting to catch onto the inevitability of forced change brought about by the internet, and this is one great example of its adaptability. Pandora's licence has but few limitations - it can't play a specific song on request, and it won't let you repeatedly skip dozens of songs in the same hour. The idea is that you can't just skip straight to the song you want.
So like the radio, you might have to weather the occasional song you don't like. But what separates Pandora from the radio is that it wants to create as personalized an experience as possible. Hence, it gives you the option to signal disapproval of a certain song. If you don't like it, you can banish it from a particular station. The station that adjusts its settings to take into account your preferences. In this way, each station gets gradually more sophisticated as it comes to know your likes and dislikes better. You can also signal that you think a particular song is great and want to hear more like it.
There are a few other limitations. Classical music is not included in the Music Genome Project but is in the pipeline. Latin music is in the process of being integrated as we speak. The free version of Pandora is also set to display advertisements soon, although these can be banished for a subscription of $36 a year. Of course, there are links on the site to allow you to buy an album if you like a particular song that you hear. However, these links are in contextual menus that only appear when you click on a song - they're totally unintrusive.
One final feature is worth mentioning before I finally give you the URL. The creators of the Music Genome Project made it stupid in one clever way - it doesn't know there's such a thing as genre. It's more sophisticated than that, and so it's not just going to play you any old random country music when you enter "Johnny Cash". No, it rather works off the hundreds of data fields stored about every song and artist. This means you will often be surprised by what you're played, and so far for me the surprises have nearly always been pleasant.
Visit www.pandora.com with no delay!