I recently was told about Pandora. I have since registered at the site, and quickly became addicted to it. Why wasn’t I told about this earlier? How could I not know?

For those of you that don’t know, Pandora is a website where all you have to do is type your favorite artist in the box and hit enter. Music from your artist of choice, and artists that are very similar, will begin streaming in. It’s a great way to discover new songs. There may even be a way to play over your unlocked cell phones.

Tim Westergren explains:

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

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.

Since we started back in 2000, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy – but now that we’ve created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe.

We hope you enjoy the journey.

Tim Westergren
Founder
The Music Genome Project

If a certain artist or song plays that you don’t like, just hit the thumbs down button and that artist or song won’t be played on your station any more. It’s great, free, and I highly suggest that you try it out. You won’t be disappointed.