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pandora- like tiva for your ears and hell for credit score

Cherith Cutestory

since it has come up twice in two different threads in the last week, i official launch the pandora thread.

pandora

pandora is a FREE on-line streaming radio station in partnership with the music gnome project. the way pandora works is simple. you type in a song or artist and it creates a station that will play that artist plus things that are similar to that artist-

"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"

so what you get is a station of bands that really have similar qualities, unlike most other streaming stations that will group things together along more superficial guidelines. plus, their number one aim is to promote, or more accurately, bring to the surface, bands that many people have not heard of before, so you get exposed to lots of new music (this is where that whole damaging credit score thing comes in)

it really is pandora's box. be careful when you open it.

 
Jun 23, 06 4:04 pm
Cherith Cutestory

ugh...freakin' idiot- that's supposed to be TIVO. i don't own a TV so all of these fancy TV recording things i just know about through hear say. gosh... in the title and everything.

okay, now that the word is out post here your favorite pandora stations. I have been in a very mogwai mood lately, so i made a mogwai station. awesome. i think there are a good 10 albums i want to buy now from it.

Jun 23, 06 4:08 pm  · 
 · 
eddie

reading your description of how pandora works shows it's one major fundamental problem. it plays songs that are similar to the songs that you already know and have inputed into their system. this leads to the songs that pandora plays for you to be to homogenous meaning that you are never really introduced to anything that is completely different from what you already listen to. now don't get me wrong, i enjoy pandora too and i have been introduced to artists that i was not familiar with before. but, none of these artists are anything radically different than the music that i already listen to before using pandora.

i can't say thought that i have any great ideas on how to solve this problem. maybe the introduction of some more general categories that describe the imptus behind the creation of the music that they play could help but this would probably just end up becoming something similar to most other streaming stations; which obviously would a step backwards. i guess that there is no better way to find totally different music other than chance.

perhaps i'm just being way too picky, but pandora is a great site that is worth checking out. and they have pretty good sized library of even rather obscure music that they play from (although it does have it's limits). lately i have been listening to two stations that i set up, merbow radio (noise/industrial/avante garde) and velvet underground radio for rock's better days.

Jun 23, 06 4:38 pm  · 
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manamana

the thing is, though, that you can manipulate the algorithms it uses by inputting stuff that is difficult (or easy) to classify.

for example:

"sophie zelmani" gets things from bluegrass to folk to rock to jazz

"peter rowan" is obviously just going to get you bluegrass

recently I've bee doing alot of britpop...so on the occasions I fire up pandora I usually start with "ocean colour scene", "Doves", and the like.

tip: when you run out of "skip" options...just start a new station, and it resets

Jun 23, 06 6:16 pm  · 
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some person

Thanks for the link, randar82. I truly enjoy the generative nature of the site. While I generally am not a music fan, I could see myself returning to this site often.

Jun 24, 06 9:48 am  · 
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