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I'm assuming you're saying you just don't want to run Flash, since otherwise you REALLY don't want to be using an outdated version of the player (security issues). Best solution I've found: Install Flash player, then disable it. You can disable it (IE-wide global switch) using the Add-In Manager (you can reach this from the Tools comand bar icon, or by double clicking a spot on the Status bar - I think there's s tooltip that appears when your mouse is over the Add-In Manager) and flash will then just not load. You shouldn't get any prompts at all, except perhaps the first time, and I'm pretty sure you can set that to never appear again. It's not quite as good as Flashblock because you can't block specific sites while allowing others - global switching only - but it works well, and can be enabled/disabled in about 3 clicks.

Some truly wonderful sites, like Pandora.com, are awfully boring without Flash. Yes, there is a justification for its existence. You really don't want to run an outdated version, though.

Somewhat OT, but useful info for those running IE7.

What, it became a pretty nifty streaming media service?

Ever heard of the Music Genome Project? It's used by a site www.pandora.com to drive a personalized internet radio station. I am extremely impressed at how well it picks new music that appeals to me.

I wonder if a similar project could do the same thing for movies...

Let me start by saying that I am definitely an iPod guy. I have owned several iPods (3G, 4G, Photo, Video, Shuffle). I develop iPod compatible software and have been heavily involved in reverse engineering the iTunes database formats.

That said, the e200R and Rhapsody 4.0 actually appear to be a decent alternative to an iPod/iTMS, not to mention Microsoft's Zune. I know, I know - BestBuy and Real (along with Microsoft WMA) sound like a match made in hell, but the features posted on Wired actually sound interesting - especially "My Rhapsody Channel" (sort of like Pandora for portable music players) and "Dynamic Playlists" (same idea, but featuring new releases).

Regardless of what you think of Real, you can't argue that they are doing some innovative things here (we'll have to see on how well it is executed). And while I haven't even touched a Sansa, they are the 2nd most popular MP3 player and do get decent reviews.

I'm thinking that for people who are interested in renting music, as opposed to the $0.99 per-track iTunes model, this sounds a lot more compelling than any of the PlaysForSure alternatives. If they would just subsidize the player and sell it cheap ($99 or less) with a 1 or 2 year service commitment, I think they could do very well.

http://www.pandora.com/ is the one I use, but I'm sure there are others out there. I still keep up with a few bands that release an album every couple of years, but by no means am I buying a CD every weekend, so my habits personally would probably be part of the 'file sharing is bad argh!' statistic, rather unjustly imo.

Now if only they could mix this with the create-your-own-station technology of Pandora ( http://www.pandora.com/ ) in a way that I could turn it on full-screen (silent ads at bottom fine) on my HTPC-- I'd use it. Probably a lot.

User listens to music for free, but there are ads. Where have I heard of this before? Lots of Internet radio around, like Pandora, that nominally doesn't allow the music to be captured, played on a portable device, etc., except if you find where the files are cached, and rename them to SomethingUseful.mp3.

Really nothing to see here, except for the fact that Universal now realizes that music being heard leads to music being bought.

Thank you. The trouble it seems is the excllent independent artists don't get the publicity that the recording industry. Yet if the internet has taught us anything its that small independent voices can get a lot of attention.

Why not a Your tube style site for music. Have a system where users can mode your stuff up or down. Ad supported but if you want to download a DRM free, high quality mp3 you can for half a buck or something. There are a bunch of sites that can already guess your music tastes based on other artists you like your own mp3 collection and suggest new material. It ought to be easy to make a playlist of things you might like by independet artists. Heck its a solved problem in a limited way http://www.pandora.com/

Its not even going to use the same amount of bandwidth as yourtube because its not video. There I days I go into work and wish I could just plug my headphones into the computer to listen to something new and not on my mp3 player. emusic tries bless 'em but they need new performers. I suspect that you will stop using p2p if you can just get music easily from the source.

Perhaps it would be an advanced form of Internet radio, where each user gets a personalized stream of the music they like, and Google uses their context and marketing technology to make a tidy profit off of the millions of attentive ears.

You CAN advertise any part of your catalog very specifically to people who like similar products.

Especially with things like music. Look at some internet radio like http://www.pandora.com/ or http://www.launch.com/ there are some great ways to market that 90% that doesn't usually get big advertizing.

Both of those sites let you start off your own internet radio stations, and then they try to match your preferences and bring in similar music, and once in a while they throw in a curveball that you may or may not like.

So I start off a station with my favorite Indie Band A that gets marketing, and then I hear favorite bands B, and C. But whats this? Some new Band D that I've never heard because it is never advertized? Cool, I like this!

It's a lot like Amazon's preferences, and products that can be marketed in this manner support the idea of the Long Tail. But it definately is not for every market.

I don't think they do this anymore, but allofmp3.com used to allow logged in users to stream any album in some crappy quality. At work it sure beat any of the alternatives...

I don't like keeping a large music collection at work and I don't want to carry my media player there either so I have recently been using Pandora to stream music that I actually like to my work machine. It's not the best solution but it's better than the alternatives (i.e. streaming ABC/Disney stations) :(

personally I am all for decentralization but I realise there are some users who want to open up one program and then start typing an e-mail and buy movie tickets within the same app (a few years off in WMP)

I could already open up 1 program and start typing an e-mail and buy movie tickets within the same app - Firefox. I could also listen to music and run calendar and spreadsheets and look at my pictures and read news. Lots of people are trying to make it so that you only ever need one program to run on your PC, and that's already the case for 99% of computer users.

>>I'm not familliar with Pandora but based on the article I assumed it worked similar to last.fm..

Well, how wrong you were! In fact, that's the strength of Pandora that it does not recommend you based on what 'others' are listening. Remember, mob is always stupid. Thats why Pandora wins over last.fm by miles.

Check this out for more information. And please, read some more before bashing Pandora - its a little heaven on the net when it comes to music.

My Pandora prog rock station works fine. Try basing your station on more than one band: Dream Theater, Angra, Rush, Cynic, Opeth, etc.

e.g. http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh1426048

I'm not sure about the others, but I know that Pandora has side advertisements on their website, and there is a limited number of songs you can skip.

Did you see Pandora listed in the article? That's a fully fledged, and nice app. Also Laszlo mail is installed as the default webmail for Earthlink subscribers? And of course... there's this list of apps! :)

There are two things I use for "renting" music. Because I view renting as listening before I buy. That way I can keep the ones I love forever and drop the crap that sucks. The first one is http://www.pandora.com/. It's awesome for finding similar types of music using it's own techinique. The second is http://www.last.fm/. It requires an install, so not too handy at work, but it bases your preferences off other people. And it shows all the songs you have listened to and how many times. I use the blend, http://pandorafm.real-ity.com/, so it picks similar songs, but I still get the points in last.fm for listening to it and chat with other people about what they like. Plus at work I don't want to install the last.fm player, so the in-browser playback is nifty. And it's freeeee~ And thus I have infinite amounts of music to listen to and try, and I only have to buy a small(ish) amount that I want to have at all times.

Well since I love it so, I'll pimp it bit :)

Try http://www.pandora.com/ it is absolutely amazing for discovering new music. Not really a replacement for this feature from Napster, but quite complementary.

LetterRip

Try out www.pandora.com Enter in a song/band you like, and get a whole lot of music of a similar vein, much of which (if you are like me) you had no idea existed. There's a vertical add on the page, but the listening is ad-free. It takes a bit of listening to get a station that you really like (you vote "like" or "don't like" on each song), but I find that its definitely worth it.

If the search angle is what they're going for, they'd do well to look at the Music Genome Project

Something you may want to try is Pandora. /. had an article on it a while ago, so I checked it out and I am hooked. It is a great way to find artists that you didn't know exist, since Pandora selects music based on the qualities of each piece, not a large, broad category. I have a paid account, but I think there is a free version as well that is advertisement supported. Everyone I know who has tried it loves it.
Granted, you can't download the music (it is provided through a Flash-based player, and downloading really wouldn't work well for what the service provides), but it should be able to keep you entertained.

Another interesting service along similar lines is at www.pandora.com. Input a band or song you like, and it picks something that sounds similar, you vote whether you like it or not, and see where it goes from there.

My biggest fear though is the music industry gets "caught" and settles in similar fashion to their previous settlement, à la "giving away" free downloads (by the truckload) to local libraries, but restricting the downloads to non-selling tracks. Sigh.

Aren't plenty of good songs non-selling ones anyway? I'd take one New Amsterdams download before ten Britney ones. Maybe that would open people up to some new things. Now, I'm not saying that all popular music is bad, because it isn't, but there's a lot of good music out there that nobody hears, people just need a kick in the pants to be motivated to find it.

I hope Pandora becomes popular for this reason.

• ...802.11g connection to neighbor's 6 megabit pipe.
  
• 2+ GB e-mail account with Gmail
  
• 5+ terabytes of music from Pandora*
  
• instead of bookmarks, www.google.com as homepage: instant access to 8+ billion web pages.

• late model AMD chip.
  
• 1 gig RAM.

I think Pandora has music Internet radio right. Traditional Internet radio broadcasts have nothing on it when it comes to music. With Pandora I can build my own station, skip songs I don't like... it goes on.

That leaves talk radio. I think podcasts have got this right. The only thing a traditional Internet radio broadcast has up over it is that you can do it more or less live and have people call/IM in.

I think traditional Internet radio has failed because people tried to transfer the radio format to a new medium not very suited for it. Now we're seeing new formats taking advantage of the new medium, and they are very successful.

Just use Pandora, it's an amazing service.

If you don't know where to start, listen to Grooove http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh12211603

This doesn't have anything to do with Halo 2 on Vista.

That said, please visit Radio Grooove on Pandora at http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh12211603

The basic lineup is trance-techno-goa-groove-synth, Pandora varies the list from those origins. It's free, runs on Flash.

If this annoys you please feel free to mod this to hell, but please note the music is *free*.

It's really the only game in town if you want to write desktop-style apps that live in the browser

I'm curious to know if your team looked into OpenLaszlo. There are some pretty nice apps built on it—the Behr Paint ColorSmart tool used an early version (before they opened the source), and I think Pandora is built on it as well. I'd really like to hear from someone who's compared the two. I have a database-driven Flash project coming up, and I can buy Flex if I have a good reason to, but if Laszlo will work it would sure be nice.

I just went to Pandora's website and entered William Shatner as my starting artist and I got Scott Walker, Ulysses, and shocking as it may seem William Shatner. I got a kick out of their description of William Shatner's music though :-)

I'd love to see the genome project open its data .. then the databases would serve text info for the track that isn't disputable (preferably from the record producer) and then the genome.

Unfortunately many albums on FreeDB and CDDB are all marked with the same genre .. if this *band* is a jazz band, then every track on every album is tagged 'Jazz'. However there's many bands who might be considered Jazz who include a track that just isn't Jazz. Or more often, an 'Acid Jazz' band will include a 'Luisiana Jazz' track. I imagine the same problem exists in the OP's meta-genre of modern dance music.

The genome doesn't care who the band is or what anybody else thinks of them .. they categorise individual songs on various things .. Major Key Tonality, Mildy Synchopated, Strong Vocals ...

That's much more useful than 'genre' as it (should) help any music player to find like-music. The genome project have released Pandora for this purpose. Give it a song you like and it will play other similar music based on the genome, not on the band or 'genre'.

Cheers!
Rick

If you're into music playlists webs you really have to check Pandora, a great page that creates playlists based on genetic algorithms that relate an entire collection of songs to the one you describe as your favourite.

--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95

I think it is a matter of scale. When the bartender brings you the 'usual', you're not concerned that he's selling that data to someone else. When a computer is able to determine what the 'usual' is, like iTunes, or the grocery store, or Amazon, or whatever, they are able to collect much more data and able to mine it efficiently.

On the one hand, I like the idea of recommending music that is similar to me - that's what is compelling about some online services (like Pandora). On the other hand, I too have concerns about what will be done with this data. It might seem harmless enough, but just what kind of profiling can they do?

In the end, as mentioned above, it is posted right on Apple's site that this is going on, so this is not spyware, it's a feature.

"... Last.fm is all about tracking a user's music and creating profiles, and guess what? Best thing I ever did as far as music goes. I've found a ton of new stuff and am enjoying music a lot more than I used to..."

The Pandora/ Music Genome Project does something similar, but rather than saying, "other users that listened to [that] album, also bought [these] albums", the Music Genome Project relies on the music itself, matching other music preferences by style, tempo, dynamics, etc. In fact, the application asks for your help.

Pandora (http://www.pandora.com/) does EXACTLY this, and when it was discussed on Slashdot a few months ago, it was praised as being a huge innovation in music technology. What's the difference, and more importantly, whats the big deal?

My opinion is faster broadband will allow more robust services to be provided on the interent.

SERVICES:
VOIP most likely the primary service to be adopted with TV(Podcasts etc...) & radio (http://www.pandora.com/ etc...) services receiving more real success.
Future services might be the real adoption of video services delivered with VOIP, & much wider adoption of video casting... (getting access to your DVR from anywhere on the internet)

SURFING:
However I think faster broadband will NOT be likely to increases visits to any given website.

Pandora.com is pretty cool.

In these old posts we spoke about calculating the "random song that I would like".

Incidentally, a few days after having this discussion I accidentally stumbled upon a very interesting project - Music Genome Project and the Internet radio based on that database that streamed random music similar to what you vote up.

It is amazing. I didn't expect this functionality to already exist in some form. Looks like the opening of the media is on schedule. :)

With zero distribution costs consumption of and payment for the media are bound to separate.

Pandora kicks ass too.

Yep.

Personalized internet streams such as Last.fm and Pandora give people a much better alternative to radio while they're working at a computer. You can get the music you know you like, while at the same time get exposure to new music - and not new music that the labels are promoting like crazy, but new music that will fit into your existing tastes.

Then you take this information to buy music that fits you more, toss it on portable music players such as an iPod, and you've got a ton of music wherever you go.

But this wouldn't be quite as necessary if radio wasn't getting worse and worse. The variety has gone downhill as ClearChannel and other corporations take over mass control and standardize everything to a small playlist and shove more and more ads in.

... using Flash. And its a subscription music service, and a pretty good one too. though you can't exactly pick which songs you listen, too. http://www.pandora.com/

Yeah, that's what I gathered too. Their point of view doesn't make any sense to me, though. If I hear music I like, i get more excited and more likely to buy it if it's cheaper. like a $8.99 CD is way more appealing to me than a $13 CD for instance.

With services like Pandora becoming available, it becomes way easier to be inroduced to acts and artists you don't know, but still really would like. The control of delivery and marketing is slowly eroding, and this should bring the peaks and valleys closer together. i.e. acts considered "less" popular will get more exposure, and acts considered "more" popular will get less, if only because people learn about music different now that radio is being eroded.

atleast, that is the future i would like to see. who knows what's going to happen. Pandora is a great start. I hope it does not lose momentum or run into RIAA roadblocks.

My first thoughts after reading the headline and start of summary were that it's a dupe. Maybe it is, maybe I'm just mixing it with the story about pandora, which is supposed to find music that you will like based on characteristics of songs you already like.

You might want to check out Pandora (a result of the Music Genome Project).

Actually, I'm selling Pandora a bit short. They have done far more than just classified the music. The algorithm they use to help you find new music is the really redeeming feature. It's like the TiVo interface: you give it a "seed" song, and then start rating songs with the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down. It tries to decide what you like, and it seems to have quite a high batting average compared to other similar services. Best of all, they have included a bunch of non-RIAA artists, so it really puts all music on a level footing. The RIAA should probably leave down-loaders alone and make sure that this goes nowhere... it is the end of their relevance if it catches on.

Actually, thanks to Slashdot, I'm considering subscribing to Pandora for a year. It costs $36/year (US currency, I presume), some of which no doubt goes to the RIAA groups. Here's a site that's maintained by music professionals, categorizing music based on far more criteria than I'm qualified to describe, yet selects music that I've heard and like as well as a lot of stuff that's brand new which I like. Now I can look at those new artists, identify which labels they're from (and if they're affiliated with RIAA), and acquire more music from those artists (either second-hand if they're hooked into RIAA or directly if they aren't).

I think of the subscription as severance pay. Sure, RIAA gets one last piece of me, but I get a valuabe resource to learn other places where I can get what I want without having to support them again.

P.S. /., get these damned CSS layouts or whatnot fixed. It would be nice to be able to preview.

Services such as http://pandora.com/ that introduce listeners to music that is not on the radio will allow independent and lesser known artists to succeed without the promotional value that signing with a big label confers. If so the big labels, radio stations, and music channels will lose some of their influence and thus power.

Don't know if it's in the article or not, but it's at http://pandora.com/

1- The website being discussed: Pandora

2- While free and very cool, this service is only free for the first 10 hrs

Try the site: http://www.pandora.com/

Try heading over to http://www.pandora.com/

They recommend artists/songs based on their objective musical similarity to an artist/song you input, and have a good mix of mainstream and indie. It has its flaws, and I've personally not had much luck with the recommendations there (e.g. I put in Muse and they recommended me loads of buttrock. No, Pandora, I already told you I /don't/ want to listen to Styx), but then I'm extremely picky and can't stick within a single genre to save my life. YMMV.