Interesting radio station that uses music's DNA to recommend songs...

Max Leung · 10-07-2005, 05:22 PM

I saw this article linked on Slashdot:

Unraveling Music's DNA: Pandora Media's 'Music Analysts'
Dissect Songs to Recommend CDs

Quote:

Mr. Coons, 45 years old, is contributing to what Oakland, Calif.-based Pandora Media Inc. calls the Music Genome Project -- an ambitious effort to create DNA-like blueprints for songs and then use them to make music recommendations based not on opinion, but on science. The company believes its music recommendations are so accurate that users will pay $36 a year for them.

Anyone try this yet?

Dave Gorman · 02-15-2006, 03:07 PM

I stumbled upon Pandora a few weeks ago. Mostly I listen to classical music and haven't listened to the radio in years (It's just not worth enduring all the crap and commercials for maybe one decent song an hour...).

I absolutely love Pandora! It's been an outstanding way to find new music that I like. I've made a lot of amazing discoveries that I otherwise probably never would have.

TomCW · 02-15-2006, 04:55 PM

Most of the time, Pandora is spooky amazing at picking music you'll like, at other times it's way off the mark. Be sure to tell it that you 'like' or 'don't like' each song it plays so it gets (alledgedly) smarter.

Tom

Gabriel.H · 02-15-2006, 08:35 PM

pandora has definitely helped me find a bunch of bands I have never heard of that are totally amazing....I get the occasional "why the hell do they think I would like this song" type of song every once and a while, but it does a pretty good job for the most part.

Bob Turnbull · 02-15-2006, 09:35 PM

Yeah, I've found a bunch of stuff from about 15-20 stations I set up. I set them up based on different bands or songs across different genres. Not perfect for sure, but as you tune it by telling it what songs you like or not (as well as maybe adding more bands and songs to the base reference) it gets pretty consistent.

The only "problem" is it tends to play lots of the same songs if you restart a station.

Along with recently signing up for emusic.com (40 downloads a month for $9.95 - ends up being about 30 cents Canadian a song), I've been hearing lots of new stuff lately. Some of my emusic downloads have been based specifically on what I heard on pandora.

Edit: By the way, if anyone is wondering from the quote in the first post, the pandora.com service is currently free.

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kamyiu · 02-18-2006, 05:30 PM

i tried pandora a few months ago, i didn't like it much. last.fm is much better for me.

Kevin C Brown · 02-18-2006, 06:16 PM

I have to try this. I had a thought many years ago, that if you could "deconstruct" the different elements of a song that a person likes, that then you could "predict" what other stuff a person might like. Looks like someone has finally done it.

But my idea was having a computer do the analysis, sort of like AI. Be a lot quicker and easier to analyze large numbers of songs.

Dick Knisely · 02-18-2006, 07:40 PM

I tried it out and it works pretty well. One issue is the size of the database, a fair number of old or somewhat obscure artists weren't recognized. The basis for making one artist or song similar to another is sometimes not very obvious and it will make some big mistakes because of apparent similarities that don't work. I found, for instance, that entering some 60's instrumentals got me a strange mix of that era and current dance/electronica that isn't at all to my taste but could be coded as being alike. On the other hand putting in a couple of West Coast "cool" jazz artists did result in a consistent string of stuff that's good and in a few cases from artists that I didn't know or at least didn't know the album/track in question.

Very interesting idea. Conceptually a little like what AllMusic.com tries to do with the genre exploration although not with the stream audio. All-in-all it worked better than I'd have expected especially across such a broad range of music.

Dave Gorman · 02-19-2006, 09:03 AM

Quote:

last.fm is much better for me.

I tried and abandoned last.fm before discovering Pandora. In addition to being forced to install yet more clutter, it didn't play nearly as good of music (for me) and did not have nearly the capacity for fine-tuning as Pandora (the ability to have multiple stations, each with its own focus).