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

Hurray!

[rbochan]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/07/173021 5&tid=141&tid=187
At least this one took over a month.

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.

Re:So then...

[Troglodyt]

Pandora and LastFM are two very different services.
LastFM is recommending music you might like from a social perspective.
Pandora builds on the music genome projects, and lets you hear music that actually sounds similar, not music that other people who like your music might listen to.
It's kind of a double edged sword I guess, since you arguably get to listen to more new music through LastFM, but with Pandora you get to listen to stuff you would never have found through your social channels at all.

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.

Tips for getting the most out of Pandora

[Anonymous Coward]

The best resutls come from submitting a song that you like. Using the Artist will most likely get you going down the wrong path. This is due to not all songs sounding similar from one artist. I have had the best results by putting in 2 or 3 songs that are similar to my ear that like. If you can't think of any songs by an Artist, Google it first. Also, there is a "rating" system. If you like the song, then give it a Thumbs Up, if you don't, give it a Thumbs Down. This will help your station learn what kind of music you are actually looking for. Rate the songs for better results.

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?

Personalized tastes lead to blinders

[AeroIllini]

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.