pandora.com

It has been a painfully long time since I last posted, and I'm going to reenter the fray with a (for me) rare music post. It's not about a band or a song or a concert but rather about an internet radio project/station/concept/etc that seems a completely logical outgrowth of the internet but hasn't been realized (that I know of) until now. You can put in a song title or artist name, and this little widgety player will put together a continuous playlist of music that shares characteristics with whatever you entered. It seems almost so intuitive as to be beneath mention, but it's a fabulous tool to explore broad swaths of music and have contact with lots of bands that you might otherwise never hear of. For example, I'm in the process of falling in love with The Blow, and I put them into pandora and three songs later I got introduced to the Buttersprites, a japanese Fem-Punk band that's fabulous (at least according to the one song I heard), despite my complete inability to understand them even when they were singing in English. The pandora concept is just the front end of a larger whole called the Music Genome project which seeks to identify "musical genes" in bands, songs, etc. It sounds high-tech, but I think it's basically just a bunch of music nerds who listen to TONS of music and classify it. That makes it sound fairly subjective, but that's something that I like about it. You could probably write a fancy algorithm to do the same thing, but this gives it a more personal feel, like there's a DJ out there spinning just for me... Although the song she just put on sucks ass. Don't ever listen to Animal Collective's "Project Hummer". I think it involves an autoharp...