Pandora Radio: The Best Music Anywhere

Most people like a certain type of music and I am no different. Unfortunately, what most people hear is dictated to them by the radio. If you like classic rock, you tune into your local classic rock station and probably are going to hear the same music that they were playing ten years ago and will be playing ten years from now. If you like pop radio, you will hear the same songs that every pop radio station is playing throughout the country. The only time someone can discover new music that they like is either by chance or by having their friends tell them about it. Fortunately, Tim Westergren, the founder of the Music Genome Project, is trying to remedy that problem with the creation of a music site called "Pandora."

Pandora is an on-line radio station that can be geared and tweaked to fit the type of music that you like. However, what Pandora has done is not classify music into categories like 'Rock', 'alternative', 'adult alternative', etc. These categories are so loosely based that many times you will like one or two songs each hour, find a few others okay, and dislike a few of them as well. Pandora is using the Music Genome Project to classify songs not into what genre they are 'suppose' to belong to, but rather, they have looked at each song individually and broken it down into a plethora of categories so as to classify each song correctly, instead of how a band "looks like" or "should sound like."

How is this possible? Well, according to the Pandora website, in 2000, a group of musicians and technologists came up with an idea to create "the most comprehensive analysis of music ever." They essentially broke down music to a fundamental level and created what they called "genes" or musical attributes that can be found in different songs. Each song has different "genes" just like each person has different genes. While people are similar and will share some similar qualities, so does music. Some of the "genes" that they looked at were melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics and vocals. Total, they created over 400 categories. What this did was classified music by each song and into so many different categories that each song is now individually compared to other songs that are similar, not just in a general sense, but more specifically and therefore more accurately.

So, once they started on the Music Genome Project, they essentially created a website that allows you to "search" the database of musical geneology that they created to find music that you like. How this works is quite simple, you type in a band that you like. For example, I put in Pearl Jam and the database searched its records and started playing a song that was "typical" of Pearl Jam's sound. Once that song was done, Pandora began playing songs that were similar in style to Pearl Jam. Again, when I say style, I don't mean "grunge" but rather, it looked at the "genes" of a Pearl Jam song and compared that to other songs of the same sound. The result of this is two fold. First, you can listen to music that you like and second, you are able to discover bands that you may not have ever heard of before that you will enjoy.

There are a couple of aspects to Pandora that have really made it user friendly. First, you can create an account and then save your radio stations that you create. Going back to the Pearl Jam example, you can save that station and its preferences. Now, what you can do is actually add more bands to that radio station. So, if you wanted to add Nirvana or Soundgarden, or whoever, you just click on it and add that band and Pandora adjusts its searching to compensate. This has really worked for me with new music. I really liked Death Cab For Cutie, The Killers and Silversun Pickups, so I put all three of those bands together and called the radio station "New Music." Because of this, I have discovered about a dozen other bands that I really enjoy and have bought their music because of Pandora. Bands such as Keane, Boyd Tinsley and Mute Math are great, but there is a good chance that I never would have listened to them without Pandora.

Secondly, is the thumbs up or thumbs down feature. What this allows you to do is fine-tune your choices. Occasionally, Pandora will pick a song that either just doesn't fit or you just don't like. When this happens, you can give a thumbs down to it. If you really like a song, you can give it a thumbs up. What this does, is that it fine tunes the songs to fit it even more. This is especially important when you first start a new radio station. There are a lot of variables, so they play a large variety, and the thumbs up and down allow you to fine tune it so that you get more songs that you like. This has allowed me to make the mix better, and therefore more enjoyable.

Third, you can click on the song and do several things. First off, you can bookmark either the song or the artist. The artist or song is then added to your favorites and you can view them later to remind yourself of the bands/songs that you really liked. Secondly, when you move the mouse over the picture, you can click on the about button to find out information on the song and the band. It brings up a new page that lets you see how the song is categorized. When clicking on Melatonin by the Silversun Pickups, there were the seven major features of that song. Third, you can click on the buy button and you can pick either Amazon or iTunes. This works really well if you have iTunes set up on your computer. You just click on the iTunes button and it brings you to the iTunes page with that song.

What Pandora has done for me and for thousands of other people can be done for you. I have been able to listen to music that I enjoy, but at the same time find new music that I would never had heard before. This prevents me from falling into a trap, that a lot of people fall into when they graduate from High School or College, in that they stop finding new music and just listen to the same things for years and years. Try it out, and you will not regret it!