Pandora

This is pretty cool:

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Pandora is the internet radio application that has resulted from the project. I personally really like the genome/algorithm aspect of it, as a variety of bands that I would not have thought really went together have been offered up for my listening enjoyment as being similar. It's definitely worth checking out if you have eclectic tastes, especially if you only have a few artists that you know of in a particular genre, as all you have to do is input an artist or a song that you are a fan of. The software takes it from there, riffing off of your original input. You have the ability to give thumbs up or thumbs down depending on how well you like any particular song or artist.

I'm currently riffing off of the Red Hot Chili Peppers...I wouldn't have thought that AC/DC, Maroon 5, Tom Petty, and the Smashing Pumpkins had that much in common, but thanks to Pandora I now see that they actually do. Give it a spin, you won't be disappointed.

h/t: Atlas Blogged, via Brad