Sep 28, 2008
Pandora
Even though I didn’t go to ACL this year, I still managed to come out of Austin with a new music discovery. Muchos gracias to Mark for tuning me in to Pandora. Pandora is a product of the music genome project, which aims to ”capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” using over 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them.
Basically, you tell Pandora what kind of music you want to listen to by selecting a song or artist, and it creates a great big playlist of similar music for you. I think this is what Apple is ultimately trying to do with their iTunes “Genius” feature, but Pandora has a huge head start. So far, Pandora blows Genius out of the water.
Did I mention it’s free? A great way to discover new artists!!
You can listen from pandora.com, or there are standalone applications for PC, Mac, the iPhone, and a gob of other internet-capable mobile phones.
Yeah, I used to really enjoy finding new artists there until suddenly one day I got this: Dear Pandora Visitor, We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S.
I’ve tried using a VPN located in the US but it chokes the bandwidth so bad it wouldn’t function right :-(
Cool post! Thanks. I’m definitely checking it out.