Pandora.com is amazing. If you’ve never checked out it i suggest visiting immediately. Pandora is a streaming music site similar to Yahoo! Music, Last.fm and the like. It a services that creates a customized playlist for you based on your musical tastes, with one twist, it actually works really well!
The difference is in the way it selects songs for you. Services like yahoo! typically use an amazon style popularity system. “People who like X also like Y.” The problem with this type of system is the assumption that all good music is popular. Not to mention that it’s also completely unscientific, it doesn’t actually compare the content of music.
Pandora is different. Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project. The project was started 6 years ago to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level.” They use 400 attributes to describe each song, from the vocal qualities to musical make up to recording style and probably a bunch of other esoteric musician crap. For instance, some of the attributes describing IOU by Metric include “basic rock song structure, electronic influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony acoustic rhythm piano and extensive vamping.”
After about 8 – 10 hours I’ve tuned one of my channel very well. I’ve found myself listening to a lot of bands I’ve heard of, but never gotten around to listening to. I’ve also stumbled across few new bands I’m really digging.
The service is 100% legal – they pay royalties – and more or less ad free – there are a few amazon ads on the main page.
The only downside is the 10 song skip limit. Due to some retarded DMCA stipulation you are not allowed to skip more than 10 songs per hour, this apparently would be considered music on demand, which is illegal.
A message on the “subscribe” page threatens that they’ll soon start to advertise. If and when that happens I’ll probably pay the $4/mo.
Pandora is arguably the future of the radio. I’d love to be able to download 10 or 15 songs from my playlist, I wouldn’t even mind paying a few buck for them.
Check it out yoz.
References:
Inside the Net 6: Tim Westergren of Pandora Media
Wikipedia
Official Site
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Pandora and The Music Genome Project
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The Alphabet According to Google
I accidentally typed ‘s’ in my firefox location bar and found myself at mcdonalds.com, thanks to the built in google search redirect. This promoted me to see what the reset of alphabet looks like according to google. Some of these make more sense than others.
a Apple.com
b B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in Occupied Territories – Kinda Random.
c C-Span
d D-link
e E! Online
f F-Secure
g Gmail
h H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online – “H-Net is an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web.” I guess they’re doing a good job if they’re the number one result for H. Next I search for hydrogen I might be unpleasantly suprised.
i iTools.com – Some sort of search portal. Their logo is an orange in the process of being squeezed. I don’t understand.
j Jennifer Lopez
k K Desktop Environment
l Europa – The European Union On-Line – there isn’t even an l in their URL.
m Texas A&M; University – check out the aggiecam.
n The N – This is one makes 100% sense.
o orielly.com
p PFLAG.org:Pflag – (not to be confused with pee flag), Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians & Gays
q Q4music.com – The World’s Greatest Music Magazine Online – 2 observations here: a) i didn’t understand the site until i read the title, b) i guess “world’s greatest” doesn’t mean “worlds most well known” cuz i’d not heard of them before; and i used to work for an online music magazine.
r The R Project for Statistical Computing – “R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language…” good to know.
s McDonald’s
t AT&T;
u The University of Arizona, Tucson Arizona – why isn’t it pronounced “TUC-SON,” crazy americans
v VCOM – They appear to be a competitor of Symantec.
w The White House
x The X.Org Foundation – think x windows
y Yahoo! Messenger – “Now with voice” good to know
z A to Z Teacher Stuff For Teachers – FREE online lesson plans, lesson plan ideas and activities, thematic units, printables, themes, teaching tips, articles, and educational resources. It’s all there in the title.
Here are the numbers (these don’t actually work from the location bar in FF).
These make a lot less sense.
I suppose the software downloads could be in reference to specific versions.
0 Business 2.0 – they were 2.0 before it was hip. It’s actually a fairly decent magazine. I have a hard time believe this is the magazine’s site, it’s hideous.
1 Mozilla – A lot of references to firefox version 1
2 Shrek 2 – huh.
3 3Com
4 Channel4.com – A public service broadcaster in the UK
5 Macromedia(adobe?) Flash Player Download
6 Apple Quicktime Download
7 Netscape Download
8 Super 8 Motels, Inc.
9 Micheal Moore – I guess this has something to do with fahrenheit 9/11
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Grey Thursday??
Guess I missed the boat by a couple of days, flying too high in the blogosphere or something.
In response to Grey Tuesday, I’m posting Danger Mouse’s American Edit.
It’ll be up until a) my bandwidth exceeds 1GB/day, b) I get a C&D; from EMI, c) the server craps out. I don’t really expect any of those to happen. So feel free to pass the link around.
http://ohryan.ca/Dean_Gray-American_Edit-2005.zip