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.

Comments

So then...

[Pichu0102]

Is it anything like Last.FM, or does it run independant of other users? If it runs independant of other users, I'd say Last.FM would win in that category, because it's showing you what other people that listen to the same music that you do like.
I think Last.FM and this have the same aim, recommending music you might like, but I think Last.FM pulled it off better.

It's just a music version of...

[Billosaur]

...Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Actually, it seems like an interesting idea. We all have libraries of CDs based on our likes and I suspect if the libraries were analyzed we'd find slighlty deeper relations between the disparate music we collect. I've got a very eclectic collection of music and I'd be hard pressed to see the link between Reba McIntyre, Pink Floyd, and David Sanborn, but maybe there is one.

Of course some conspiracy theorist is going to use this to determine that the music industry is actually selling the same 5 songs over and over again, just in different keys and rhythms. Because we all know it's true.

It's a nice site

[n0dalus]

I do like the site, unfortunately though after around 3 hours of using it, it stopped giving me new songs that I liked; it just played song's I already said I'd liked, or songs I didn't like. One interesting thing is that is uses basic mp3 files for the music, so it's actually not too hard to download the mp3's directly from the server if you log the right packets.
Pity they'll be putting ads on it (soon).

What I still havent seen anyone do

[Lord Bitman]

and now that I know C a little, maybe I'll try out making a plugin or something..
I have lots of MP3s. I like most of them. However, I'm not always in the mood for all of them. There is very little music I've dismissed completely as bad, so "Thumbs up" || "Thumbs down" is pretty lame (,stupid, closed-minded, moronic, a horrible basis for anything, encouraging of the already prevailent general-dumbness of people whose music I tend not to be in the mood for, etc)

What I've wanted is a system by which music can be automatically catagorized based not on whether or not I like it, but rather based on whether or not I'm likely to enjoy it /right now/.

How this would work: Start with the standard "Shuffle", picking at random any song. Then, if I hit "next" right after a song starts, decide "This song doesnt go well with this other song right now", and instead try selecting one which my lack of hitting "next" in the past has indicated /would/ go well. (various probability weighting schemes, decreased weight as we move on, requiring much use before it really knows you, blah blah blah...)

The closest I've seen has been plugins which weight the shuffle based on a rating you choose, which doesnt ever fluxuate.

Point: Playlists should be quaint by now. Why should I need to choose in advance what I'm in the mood to listen to an hour from now?