Opening Pandora's Box

A friend introduced me to Pandora.com last fall, so I've had the link to the site on my blog since I started writing it in May. I think I'm falling in love with a website. I've been playing with it for the past hour and a half just to see what happens when I experiment with it.

If you haven't been to the site before, it's a free online radio site where YOU create the radio stations. Each radio station can be based on a favorite artist or song. The site has a database that it will search to create a radio station with similar songs to the artist or song you on which you chose to base the station.

For instance, if you put in "Slide" by The Goo Goo Dolls, a similar song that Pandora might play would be "Collide" by Howie Day or "All My Friends" by Counting Crows. Those are purely guesses on my part, but just try putting "Slide" in and see what happens =] How it finds similar songs is really neat; I think it does it in a phenomenological manner. Some categories are: electronica influences, emphasis on studio production, vocal-centric aesthetic, east coast rap influences, swing influences, etc. Stations become more centered around your tastes because you give songs a "thumbs up" (add this and similar songs) or "thumbs down" (don't play this song).

So I made a batch of stations ages ago, but this morning, I got into refining them. I had created a nice downtempo jazz standard station stemmed from Billie Holiday's "You've Changed", a slick electro-pop station with artists similar to Kate Havnevik, and the one I'm most enjoying is my retro hip-hop station that started with Digable Planets's song "Pacifics". I've discovered a myriad (insert Heathers film reference here) of new artists and songs thanks to this site. I seriously think my music library is about to get 50 times more indie; most of the artists my stations have been playing aren't mainstream. Super cool.

So with the complete knowledge of my sounding like a bad infomercial... Try Pandora. It will change your musical life. No seriously, it will.