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hipstamirror

pandora

After reading about it on danah boyd's weblog [apophenia], I've been listening to music through Pandora, which creates custom radio stations using information from the "Music Genome Project". It's kind of cool to listen to a stream of music related to a favorite song or artist, but I think that my favorite part is reading their explanation of the defining characteristics of a particular genre.

I swear that it said that a key component of Bloc Party was something like "modest lyrical vamping", but I can't get it to say it again. It also really wants me to like a song called "Curve of the Earth" by Matt Nathanson.

Posted on Aug. 17th, 2005 at 04:34 pm | | Leave a comment | 8 comments | | Flag

Comments


decklin

interesting. i recently signed up for last.fm which seems to be taking the "let's not try to understand anything, let's just collect lots of data and throw it at the wall" sort of tack, but hey, that works pretty well for other things.
Posted on Aug. 18th, 2005 01:06 am (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

evan

i like to think that it's pretty much the only sane approach, especially for large amounts of data.

(it probably helps that my work consists of the throwing data at walls approach.)
Posted on Aug. 18th, 2005 01:24 am (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

joshc

The authority-driven model seems to work for a while, but after an extended listening period it sort of falls apart. Eventually pandora seemed unable to tell the difference between Belle & Sebastian and bad emo. On top of that, there's a limit to the number of tracks you can skip in a given hour. Part of this was probably my fault for not telling it which selections I liked or disliked.
Posted on Aug. 18th, 2005 01:41 am (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

joshc

the bogofilters definitely have a non-kosher carnivore bais in their naming conventions. The thought of having ham in my inbox isn't a whole lot more appealing than SPAM.
Posted on Aug. 18th, 2005 01:30 am (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

xanthussaves

Since the linked-to page has bupkis when it comes to info, could you maybe fill in some gaps? Like, is it Mac-only? Is it streaming only or can you have it draw only from your own collection? Ever date a fish?
Posted on Aug. 18th, 2005 06:58 am (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

joshc

it's a web-based flash player; so I assume that it works across platforms.
it is streaming-only.
can't we just forget about the past?
Posted on Aug. 18th, 2005 07:32 am (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

joshc

see also

http://blog.pandora.com/faq/
Posted on Aug. 18th, 2005 07:38 am (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

bostonsteamer

pandora's description of KoC

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goldberg/35251799/
Posted on Aug. 19th, 2005 03:50 am (UTC) | | Thread | Reply