Andrei Zmievski

Inspired by the latest entry at Yahoo! Music Blog, I registered at Last.fm and started feeding my playlist information to them via the AudioScrobbler iTunes plugin. My profile there is slowly building and I am looking forward to checking out what their customized radio station will start playing for me once they know enough of my tastes. Their recommendations so far seem to be decent, but I need to listen to about 300 tracks before the music “neighbors” become available. As a side benefit, I also put the RSS feed of the last 10 tracks played on frontpage of this site in the right hand column.
I also explored Pandora, the other service mentioned in the blog. From what little time I spent with Pandora, it seems fascinating. Created by the Music Genome Project, it allows you to specify an artist or a song and create a “radio station” that plays songs that are musically similar to the specified one. What does “similar” mean? Well, the folks at Music Genome Project analyzed over 10,000 songs of different artists and broke them down into traits, such as harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, singing and vocal harmony. Given a song, for example “Volcano” by Damien Rice, Pandora will create a station that features songs with mellow rock instrumentation, folk influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, acoustic sonority, repetitive melodic phrasing, and other similarities to the original, picking things like “Smile” by Mia and Jonah and “Igloo Glass” by Holopaw. You can add more songs or artists to the station and Pandora will try to pick tracks that cover the whole gamut of what you are looking for. You can also thumbs up or down the individual songs to fine tune your preferences and build up a favorites list. I would say its recommendations range from good to very good and I definitely intend to use it as a tool for discovering new music.