Slashdot Mirror
Pandora Radio from Music Genome Project
kramthegram writes "The Music Genome Project, an attempt to define music by it's traits in a way similar to DNA defines traits in humans has led to the development of Pandora. Pandora uses the song choices you make to see what traits appeal to you and present you with custom radio station. While limiting you to thumbs up or thumbs down, the "gene" heuristics allows for a very quick adaptation to your musical tastes." Not sure how deep it goes, and I'm not sure I like that it led me from The Who to Styx and Def Leppard. But this is a neat little tool for discovering new music.
Yeah, I wrote in to the editors as well. It's pointless for the users to care when the admins seem not to.
Trolling is a art,
And the saddest part is instead of the editors taking the marginal amount of time necessary to just delete this story and instantly post the next in the queue when someone is helpful like you and points out their foible right away, they'll keep their thumbs up their asses like nothing is going on and ignore the issue.
Also, in my case Pandora chose a song off the Opeth album "Damnation", which happens to be a much more laid-back album that contains mostly folksy ballads and absolutely no heavy metal whatsoever. So when Pandora attempted to find similar bands based on that one song, obviously the selections weren't at all what I had in mind. I couldn't figure out how to get the thing to choose a different song - it seemed locked in on that first one.
At any rate, I remember the first article speaking derisively of the "user recommendations" at Amazon. Yeah, they often suck, but I've discovered some great music there too. I never would have known about a great band called Porcupine Tree if Amazon hadn't recommended them to me as a fan of Opeth, for no other reason than the fact that Porcupine Tree's singer/songwriter/guitarist/etc. produced a few Opeth albums.
...a combination of the iTunes store (trying without buying) and www.pitchforkmedia.com to hunt for new music. Pitchfork has a few recommended albums every month, I'll look them up on iTunes, and often iTunes itself has suggestions for other artists I'll like. It's been spot on so far and has let me to some great discoveries.
As someone who has read enough books on music to know what they are talking about when they say 'We chose this song because it features x and y', I can honestly say this doesn't mean much. I think genre and statistical comparisons between users has a far greater impact on what songs it chooses than what they suggest in their FAQ/info pages.
The whole idea of analyzing a song for different qualities is great, but it really doesn't get you very far with something like this. I can think of a million songs with 'Mild rhythmatic syncopation' and 'Major key tonality' (just an example of the reasons it told me it was playing a song), and I would probably only like a small portion of them. I suspect that the genre of my song (eg 'Hard rock roots' or 'punk roots' etc) is the biggest deciding factor in what it plays -- not the actual style of the song.
I am skeptical of any algorithm that purports to gauge or classify taste. People listen to music for complicated reasons and they often listen to very different genres.
A better solution is to point people to "taste-makers".
I found by illegally downloading music using limewire, that I could find very interesting new music by simply broswing the collections of the people that were downloading from me. That really opened up my horizons as far as taste is concerned. I don't think an algorithm could come close to that.
You know, most of the media world is pretty excited about these concepts of "personalized media"... where the media that is presented to you is based on the types of things that you already like (it's just starting to take off in music, but watch for it in the future in television, movies, and internet sites). But I see this as somewhat of a problem, where people are never exposed to new things. If everything in our world is personalized and created specifically for our tastes, how do we define our tastes? When do we ever get a chance to listen to something we don't like, and say that we don't like it? Or listen to new things we've never heard of, and that may not be in any way related to our database of media we like, and say we like it?
The situation presents us with two possibilities: either we get pidgeonholed into a "genre" artificially created by the content distributors (as broad or narrow as that genre might be), or our tastes enter a feedback loop, where the only things we listen to are the things our personalized media players play for us, whose choices are based on things we listen to in our personalized media players.
So where do we get outside input? My suggestion at this point would be to do away with artificial genres and create relationships between media based purely on a database of what people like and don't like. (Last.FM does this now.) Then I would like to see the media player throw in a randomly chosen selection once in a while, just to test its own theory, so to speak. However, for that to work, the selection would have to be truly random; no fair throwing in something that you are marketing heavily (I'm talking to you, [RI|MP]AA...) just to get people to hear it. So instead of choosing music based only on your tastes, your media player will choose music based *mostly* on your tastes, and then throw you a curve ball once in a while to see how you react. Who knows? Maybe that diehard punk fan would enjoy a Beethoven piece or a 70's pop song. But the media player would never know that unless it tried.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
the last.fm proxy is excellent and I truly love last.fm radio. the only complaint I would make is that the music selection when you select similar artists to any given artist isn't a massive collection, and quickly loops the same stuff again and again. more info can be found about last.fm proxy here too: http://www.last.fm/group/LastFMProxy/
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
The Pandora app was written using OpenLaszlo ( http://www.openlaszlo.org/ ), a free software rich internet application development platform. Why do you suppose they did that instead of using Macromedia's tools and runtime?