I've complained in the past about the inadequacies of collaborative filtering. A while back I heard an NPR segment on a radically different approach to predicting musical tastes, the Music Genome Project, and now it seems they've got a streaming music player up and running. Pandora starts by asking you to enter a song or artist you like (it works best with a song, I've found, unless all your artist's songs sound the same) then analyzing its content: instrumentation, melody, mood, vocals, rhythm, etc. It then plays songs with similar elements. You can then tweak a station by giving songs the thumbs up or down. And you can enter new songs or artists into an existing station (though apparently it just gives you songs that match any of your suggestions, it doesn't try to match them all). As Jason notes it's far from perfect, but it's also far better than, say, what Amazon thinks you'll like based on albums you've already rated.
It did pretty good on my own cruel test. For starters, it did not, unlike everyone else, give me a blank look when I told it that my absolute favorite band in the whole world is Huckapoo. Nope, Pandora just smiled politely and created a playlist of songs with "pop rock qualities, a subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, repetative melodic phrasing and major key tonality." That's the nicest thing anybody's said about Huckapoo since, well, ever. It started me off with Letters to Cleo and Kari Kimmel before moving on to Zetta Bytes and Sister Hazel, at which point I told it that if I'd wanted nothing more than B-grade Huckapoo wannabes I'd buy a Disney Mix Stick. It took the hint and surprised me with a nice Ronnie Spector song I didn't know (You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory), some Liz Phair, and a couple of artists I'd never heard of but quite enjoyed: Sarah Harmer and Sanawon. Who needs satellite radio?
You can listen to my stations using the share menu and my email address: radosh@gmail.com
My pal Jake notes that its archive of world music is limited, however. (The FAQ confirms this)
Update: Things you learn from having a Huckapoo radio station: The Bratz have an album. That's almost as sweet as Huckapoo having dolls.
