Monday, April 16, 2007

Pandora: Discover New Music

Ever fancied having your own online DJ service and one that only plays music that you'll like? Well, the Music Genome Project was created with just such a listener as you in mind and the Pandora Internet Radio service is the embodiment of that idea.


Basically, Pandora allows you to create your own internet radio stations based on a selection of artists and/or tracks you submit to it. Once it has an idea of the kind of music you like, it'll feed you tracks from those artists and, here's the good bit, it'll also serve up tracks it considers match your music preferences, based on its enormous music genome tagging database. The music genome project uses a large team of highly-trained musicians to categorize the music.

That means you get to discover new artists, bands and tracks

Due to the music licensing model, there are a few restrictions to the service. For example, there's no rewind button, no facility to play a particular track and you cannot have more than one station seeded by a particular artist. Still, it's free and, having created a station and played it for a few hours, it certainly lives up to its promise of serving out new music that I'd like.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Alan,

I have seen pandora before, I'm just a little curious - do you have a US zipcode? (Pandora seems to want one)


I thought for a few seconds there that Pandora had managed to release a UK version of itself, but ended up disappointed.

Here's to a UK version soon.

Cheers
Fiona Palmar

Allan Ogg said...

I should have said but yes, it still needs a US Zip code.

That said, if you can't guess one, then just do a search for "example Zip Code".