Opening the Pandora’s Box
Another cool thing I saw at BarCamp was a demo of Pandora. Basically, they got a bunch of professional musicians in and categorized their extensive library in a very genetic fashion (hence, the Music Genome Project) which they then used to create Pandora, a music discovery service.
Imagine a radio station where you go “I think this radio station will have music like John Mayer and Jack Johnson”. It will start playing songs for you based on these patterns, but not based on any kind of “genre” as we know it, but by the music itself. Their favourite example is that you could create on on Indigo Girls and a Metallica track may (and apparently does) show up simply because Metallica has this one song that has musical properties similar to most Indigo Girls music.
So far, I’ve been impressed with both the form and the function. If you want a free trial, I have a few invitations still. When they release, it’ll be $30/year which I think it absolutely worth it but right now, it’s a free trial with invites. Shoot me an email.
__Update__: They have now launched so trial period is over. You can still try it out for 10hrs for free I think, and I can share a station out but I don’t know whether you can create your own station if I do that. If you try it, make sure you play around and try adding new radio stations, refining the music, etc.
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