Listening to New Music with Pandora
I guess it really does take three times for something to sink in. I have heard about Pandora a few times over the last few months. It turned up in one of the blogs I track, don't remember which one. Then I read an article in Searcher about it and thought, I should check this out. Finally, last week there was a story on the California Report on NPR and I finally got around to checking it out.
Pandora is really a very cool music site. It's an off-shoot of the Music Genome Project which "set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level". Basically a bunch of trained musicians analyze the hell out of a song, breaking it down into its core units (melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics). From this database comes Pandora.
You tell Pandora an artist or a song that you really like, and then it goes out and starts playing other songs that it determines are similar to the songs you like. Once the songs start playing, you can tell the system if you particularly like the song or really dislike it, and it continually updates its profile of the kind of music you like. You can also add additional artists or songs at any time to more fully round out your station. Oh, and you can have up to 100 stations at once, so you could have a station based on Pink Floyd, another based on Metallica, and another based on Nora Jones, if you are so inclined.
Personally, I think it works best if you give it a few similar favorite artists to work with. I started by just putting in Sarah McLachlan and all I got were breathy female acoustics, which were nice and all, but I was getting all sleepy listening to it. So I added R.E.M. and the men started to show up. I added Paul Simon and U2, and then I started specifying "Pride" and "Where the Streets Have No Name" when it wasn't quite right.
Now, artists I like are showing up on their own: first James, then The Waifs, The Corrs, The Cranberries, Natalie Merchant, Counting Crows, KT Tunstall, and on and on. And I haven't had to tell Pandora that I don’t like a song it's playing since the second day of using it when it pulled in Kiss for some reason.
Oh yes, the reasons it plays what it plays. For every song, you can ask it why that song is playing. Apparently, I am drawn to songs that have acoustic rhythm guitar, interweaving vocal harmony, a mix of electric and acoustic instrumentation, major key tonality, folk roots, and syncopated rhythm, among other things. Sometimes, I get curious and check why it is playing a song by an artist I've added to the station, just to see what about it might make it resonate with me. I'm particularly thankful it doesn't say, "because you said you liked it, idiot".
I also particularly liked the description of why it played a U2 song - emotional male lead vocals. Yes, I suppose that does describe Bono. : )
Finally, listening to music with Pandora for just 4 days has already introduced me to a bunch of artists I've never heard of before. I like Good Charlotte, Chantal Kreviazuk, and Girlyman, as well as many others. Or, at least, I've liked the songs that Pandora thinks have the features I like in music.
It plays older stuff, newer stuff, stuff you won't hear on local stations. Generally, I think to keep up with brand new bands, you might be better off listening to a good local radio station. But if you want to hear older tracks of bands you like and be exposed to artists you wouldn't normally be exposed to, Pandora is great.
And, if you're a musician yourself, you can send them a copy of your CD and they might include the songs in the database for people to listen to.
Overall, I'm quite pleased with Pandora (can you tell?). There is currently a free version and a fee version. The only difference is they might start including advertising on the free version someday, but they haven't yet. Steve tells me that he got to listen for 3 or 4 songs and then it started asking him if he wanted to register. This didn't happen to me because I gave them my signing-up-for-things e-mail address right away.
Getting started honestly takes all of 2 minutes, so it won't take much time to check it out. You go there, create your account if you're so inclined, and put in an artist or song you like. That's it. It starts playing music right away. Check it out!
