Pandora

This is pretty cool. It's a music player that allows you to create music stations by typing in the name of a favorite artist or song. The music data base is scanned for similar music, based on rhythmic patterns, orchestration, instrumentation, etc. Pandora will act as your personal DJ and play the style of music you like. In order to refine what your station plays, you can select the tunes you like and eliminate the ones that don't fit your taste.

So far I've tried it with blues and Latin jazz, and it works well with those. Salsa was a bust, though. They just don't have much of it in their selection. Sometimes you'll hear an artist you don't know, so it's a way of expanding your list of favorites.

Pandora is an outgrowth of the Music Genome Project.

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past 5 years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

You can't beat the price. Pandora is free.