I really enjoy listening to new music - not just new music, as in "brand new music", but new music as in "I haven't heard that artist or song before" new music."
However, when it comes to searching for new music for my iPod, I'm so lazy that I end up listening to the same songs from the same artists over and over again. Almost always, I downloaded it in the first place because someone I know told me to listen to it. I rarely "hunt down" anything new or someone new to listen to, therefore music ends up being one area of my life where I rely exclusively on the wisdom of others for direction.
In fact, I rely so much on other people for music, I have never had any wisdom about music to offer anyone, ever.
Until now.
My brother-in-law Nat was over for dinner a few weeks ago and showed me an amazing new "music discovery service" called Pandora. You just type in one of your favorite songs or artists and they launch a streaming music station with various songs from other artists they know you'll enjoy. This isn't just recommending music because they think you'll like it - they know you'll like it! If you happen to not like the recommended song (which hasn't happened to me), you just click a button and skip to the next song. This becomes a fully-customized, commercial-free radio station that is available for free to anyone who want to listen (although I do think you can pay for a premium edition).
It was founded by a guy named Tim Westergren and is powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. The site says:
"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."
I'm hooked. This service is music wisdom at its finest.
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