blog.durdle.com

To quote Peter Griffin: Holy Crap, this stuff is freaking great…

If you’ve ever had a conversation with someone about music where you’ve said “Oh, if you like them, you should listen to…” then you will love this new service. Borne out of the Music Genome Project, it uses the “DNA of music” to work out which tracks you’ll like based on minimal input from you and then generate your own personal radio station.

Check it out at pandora.com. I gave it Orbital’s “Impact the Earth is Burning” as a starting point, and the playlist it generated gave me a load of fantastic tunes, some I knew, some I’d never heard before - but all were well worth listening to! It started out by playing another Orbital track that had similar themes to Impact, then started jumping around through various interesting artists: Agnelli & Nelson, James T Cotton, Mandalay, Fatboy Slim, Jamiroquai, The KLF and even Depeche Mode.

I just created a second station, giving it Colin Hay’s “Overkill” as the starting point. (Scrubs fans will recognise the track.) It’s first response is to play something other than Overkill - Two-Headed Boy by Neutra Milk Hotel, which also features mild rhythmic syncopation, major key tonality, acoustic sonority, acoustic rhythm guitars and many other similarities identified in the music genome project. It’s next suggestion was Fake Plastic Trees (Acoustic) by Radiohead. Interesting eh?

You’ll often see two artists played next to each other where you would never think they’d go together. This happens because the Music Genome Project takes great care to treat each track individually - they don’t categorise based on the artist, as most artists will cross genres often. It’s surprisingly effective.

This isn’t just generating a playlist for you to search out tunes, or pointing you to iTunes/Amazon for CDs (although it does that too) it streams, via a Flash applet, 128kbps audio. It’s like having a personal DJ available whereever you have a an Internet connection. And if you disagree with the DJ, you can click the thumbs down button and in true Tivo fashion it’ll adjust the entire “station” for you - weighting all future tracks according to what it thinks you didn’t like - and never playing that track again.

They’ll let you play with it for free for 10 hours and then it costs a very reasonably $36 per year. If they can keep up the quality of the service for that then I’ll definitely subscribe!