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.

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.