OK. So there are so many interesting websites offering music. This is not new. But at a dinner party I had on Tuesday, a couple of friends were talking about Pandora. Indeed, my friend Jason told me about this website months ago, but for some completely inexplicable reason I never got to exploring it. And I do regret that since I have been missing out on it all this time.
So, what's so cool about Pandora is that you tell it a song or artist you like, and it runs a program that matches that song with other music that is like the music you entered. It will then start a "radio station"-like playlist and plays the "like" music that Pandora finds for you. For example, I plugged in Jamie Cullum. He's sort of lounge-y and, imho, makes for nice background music for a dinner party. Pandora created a "Jamie Cullum Radio" station for me, and then played some Tony Bennett, Mel Torme, Lou Rawls, Ben Folds, The Velvet Teen... It's great! Now, I'm really curious how deep their library is.
Other bells & whistles are that as you're listening, you can tell it if you like or don't like the new songs it finds. You can find out why it played a particular song. If you hear something you really like, you can click on a button to buy it from iTunes. You can also create favorites.
The whole thing is made possible by the Music Genome Project, which sounds like a very interesting group of musicians and technologists.
{UPDATE: On the point of how deep the library is, I've been playing around and I'm finding that Pandora can't play some artists "on demand" b/c of music licensing issues. But, interestingly, it is still able to recommend songs similar to a particular artist, and it WILL play the song/artist you requested later "in the mix with lots of other great music". This is interesting from a copyright law perspective. First, I wonder how Pandora runs the program that matches up the music? Or is each piece of music separately coded/tagged by a human(!) for certain musical attributes? I assumed it's all done mechanically by a software program, in which case, I wonder if a copy of the song is made in order to run the program? (I think that there's a good argument that such a copy would be a fair use, but this -- like the Google Project -- is untested.) I'm sure they've thought this through, but I'd love to know how it works technically. Second, this appears to be an a example of a music service that CANNOT play a song "on demand" b/c of licensing issues but CAN play the music under a compulsory (webcasting/streaming) license. At least that's what would make sense to me. OK, I'm done being copyright lawyer, and will now just enjoy the tunes...}