The husband, internet God that he is, recently found this super duper coo-el tool: Pandora Radio.
This is radio that puts the Music Genome Project to work. To Wit:
A given song is represented by a vector containing approximately 150 genes. Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Rock and pop songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, and jazz songs have approximately 400. Other genres of music, such as world and classical, have 300-500 genes. The system depends on a sufficient number of genes to render useful results. Each gene is assigned a number between 1 and 5, and fractional values are allowed but are limited to half integers.[1] (The term genome is borrowed from genetics.)Given the vector of one or more songs, a list of other similar songs is constructed using a distance function.
To create a song's genome, it is analyzed by a musician in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per song. Ten percent of songs are analyzed by more than one technician to ensure conformity with the standards, i.e., reliability.
Basically what you do is enter in an artist that you like, and it finds more artists with similar music and creates a playlist around that. I currently have my Nicola Conte Radio playing---so I'm not only listening to songs by Nicola Conte, but also, The Herbaliser, Juan Tutrifo---and many, many more. It's a lot of fun to see what comes up and there's nothing random, or computerized, about the song selections. The first fits in with the second, the third, and so on and so forth.
The husband and I have, for a very long time, been fans of Soma FM, but...some of their playlists, particularly the Secret Agent Channel (which I adore simply because they throw out quotes from Bond movies between songs) are highly repetitive. If you don't like a song that's playing on Pandora, however, you can skip right past it---and what's more is that Pandora will take your selection into account, and will play the song less, more, or not at all if you so choose.
It's quite a cool tool, and I highly recommend it.
Posted by Kathy at January 16, 2008 12:35 PM | TrackBackYeah great if you live in the US. Where you have endless stations playing one genre of music.
Pandora WAS superb, but unfortunately the dinosaurs at the record companies choked on their horlicks at the idea of people actually listening to music by their bands without paying for it. Now in the UK we are left with no choice radio, oh the 6 bands that they play are very popular you know, they're the latest thing ! Yawn.
Sorry to pour gloom on your new found toy (jealousy is not a good thing i know !), but the record industry needs to wake up to the best advertising tool that has ever been available.
Email the record bosses tell them what they've lost. Pandora radio for ever for everyone =]