Saturday, February 09, 2008

Music

I have been inspired by Haywood and all his music posting. First, I have been slowly listening to his music recommendations. But that is not the important part of this post.

The important part is Pandora.

Pandora is a website that lets you create radio stations. The site creators spent three or four years characterizing music by lots of different attributes or genes, and then formed a 'music genome' that allows comparisons between different musicians. So you go, type in a band you want to listen to, and it creates a station that has other artists that have similar qualities.

I have had huge success with the station. I type in something I feel like listening to, and I get a whole station of new music, mostly artists I have never heard of, and all of it is really good.

You can even give feedback on the other songs they are playing so that you can stream-line the station.

The only drawbacks to the site is that you can't control the music flow. You can advance to the next track, but you can't choose a specific artist or track at a particular time. You also can't go back and replay a song. It will come up again, but it is random.

So the lack of control is kind of lame. Okay, it is really lame. But, as far as giving exposure to new music, the site is awesome. So use the tool for what it is meant for. Go discover some new music. Then download it, buy it, or whatever you do so that you can listen at your convenience.

Pandora Station Recommendation: The Fugees

2 comments:

Adam said...

They even have a wide selection of Christian music. So if you type in Hillsong or Delirious? then you will get lots of good stuff too. And don't give me any crap about originality :) Just try some of it.

wilson said...

I'm glad you're enjoying Pandora, Mr. Blair!

We at Pandora wish we could offer you song repeats... Pandora adheres to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act webcaster licensing which restricts what we can do. One thing we can't do is what's called "song-on-demand".

The DMCA licensing is the reason you don't hear a specific song when you launch a station, why there's only six song skips per hour per station, and why you can't rewind.

The restrictions imposed on webcasters are intended to allow you to enjoy the music in a radio environment without replacing the legal purchase of music. We hope you can continue to find Pandora useful in expanding your musical horizons!


And Adam's right, we have over 2,000 Christian artists in our collection. :)


- Lucia, at Pandora

http://www.pandora.com/people/pandoralucia