Sylvie’s Underhanded Wonderland

I’d like to share a recent discovery with you. Some of the credit for this should go to the L.A. Times. Not long after I noticed that my iTunes music store was beta-testing customized recommendations on me, I read the Times’ article about personalized online radio.

Apparently Yahoo has its own such music service, and there are several others, but the one I tried was Pandora.com. It’s a really neat idea, and one somewhat less commercially-oriented than iTunes. Born of something called “the Music Genome Project”, Pandora lets you create your own streaming radio station(s) based on your own musical preferences. I’m not talking one station for one genre and another for another, I’m talking refinement down to the type of instruments used or harmonies favored. One of the stations I’ve created has narrowed to “charismatic female vocalists”, “subtle vocal harmonies”, and “an electric guitar solo”. I didn’t specifically pick out those descriptions: Pandora did it for me, based on songs I said I liked. The Music Genome Project seems to be some sort of huge database classifying individual songs and artists according to a great range of criteria. I can only guess at how the filtering/decisionmaking algorithms work, but Pandora’s given me some really neat selections. It plays a mix of artists I’ve already said I like, along with new artists it considers similar based on any combination of categories. This seems a great venue for new artists: the majority of the songs I’ve had suggested to me are by bands I’ve never heard of before.

I really like this idea. I wonder if they’ve thought to include things like stated musical influences, self-reported by band members in interviews. Or maybe individual band members who might have moved between groups.

Basically, Pandora is what I’ve always wished I could do to my radio stations. I get to approve or shoot down each and every song they throw at me. There are no audible ads (tasteful visual ones, though) and no deejays. In fact, the site will even stop playing a song I don’t like, the second I veto it, apologize(!), and move on to something else. It’s free, like all radio stations should be, and the artists benefit because Pandora provides quick and easy links to purchase the songs from Amazon or iTunes.

Give it a shot. I think you’ll like it.