The Music Genome Project of Sheer Brilliance

I normally don't promote websites here, but thanks to myspace and various people from my past hunting me down, I've been made aware of a fabulous internet radio site:

http://www.pandora.com

It began as a project, the Music Genome Project, and here's the description:

"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."*

So... what you, as the listener, can do is enter in a favourite song or artist, and the radio will automatically generate similar-sounding songs. It's freaking brilliant.

The "catch" is that you have to register... all they want is a name, an e-mail address and a US zipcode. If any of my German friends want to register, feel free to use my Texas zipcode: 78681. :)

I've recently gotten into some new music genres I've never listened to before, which means I'm unfamiliar with artists in that particular genre. Pandora's helped me discover other similar musicians, and it's really been great fun.


*Source: Music Genome Project