Pandora
Got an email tonight from the company that supplies my mp3 streamers. http://www.slimdevices.com. They were informing me about a new service that they have teamed up with called Pandora and that I was entitled to a free trial. Pandora is a service that has come about from the fruits of a group of musicians who for the past 6 years have been listening to a lot of music and categorizing it. Not just at your usual title, artist, album, year etc but a bit more involved, actually looking at how the songs are made up at a musical attribute level. They have tried to categorize the songs into unique elements such as melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony.
They claim to have listened to over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time.
Pandora is a web service that lets you build up your own radio station in effect. You give it the name of an artisist or a song that you like and it will suggest similar music. You can then fine tune this selection by giving each song it comes up with a thumbs up or a thumbs down so it can learn your preferences.
You can listen to Pandora on the internet or through the smlimdevice mp3 streamer. Check out http://www.pandora.com for more information. Its available in to flavours, a free version that’s laden with advertisements or a subscription based service with no ads.