Dangling Conversations

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The Music Genome

Posted 27 Feb, 2006 at 09:57 by wendy in /Music | Permanent link

I don't think anyone has mentioned Pandora here yet. It's like a radio station where you train it by telling it what you like and don't like, except that instead of basing its recommendations on what other people who like the same songs like, they've actually gone through and classified songs, so you don't just wind up with the most popular stuff.

It's also pretty smart in that it doesn't ask you to register until you've listened to a few songs first. I suspect that more sites will start doing this, suck you in by letting you use their product for a while and then ask for your personal info. Pretty slick actually. Apparently the free version has advertising, but I didn't see any yesterday so maybe they haven't found advertisers yet. Honestly, this is one of the few things I've found on the web that I might consider paying for.

Comments (3 comments so far)
I've been using Pandora for a month now, on and off. It's pretty cool - I've discovered several cool new artists with it. However, I do wish there was a way to manually adjust the fine-tuning - there are times when I flag a song as liking it for one reason, and it picks up on a different aspect and plays me stuff matching that. Then I have to mark three songs in a row as Don't Like to get it to stop.
Posted 2006/2/28 10:59:36 by RobRoy
Hacks
This system reminds me a lot of an internet music station that existed for a while back in 2002. I think it might have been called something like emusic. It also allowed you to build custom stations, displayed album art, offered other music related to what you'd chosen etc. I loved it, but it however got shut down by the RIAA. Now this has a lot of controls that the RIAA wanted, but is otherwise the same concept... and of course... if you want to ignore the 'so many skips per hour', 'we don't play the exact song you want', and other little controls Pandora's implemented... there are clever ways around them I discovered. What fun!
Posted 2006/2/28 19:49:07 by Blue
RobRoy's comment about the system "pick[ing] up on a different aspect" is one of the hallmarks of a top-down classification system like this. It's the same sort of thing as with Yahoo! back in the day, where it was easy to find things as long as you broke down categories the same way that the yahoos did.

I'd be interested to see a hybrid sort of system, where individual listeners draw their own network of connections between songs or artists (via a tagging system, perhaps) and get recommendations from the networks of people with matching subgraphs.
Posted 2006/3/1 09:03:18 by Matt
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