m-Log @ musicmedia.net

I’ve taken my posts and moved them to my new website, www.bigfatmusicblog.com.  Check it out.

Well 7AM anyhow. Still seems early for blogging. Anyhow, you may have noticed in m-Log’s links list, a link to Pandora.com. This is one of the cooler things I found on the web recently. It was designed for those of us who have moved on from college to careers and families and just don’t seem to have to time to find great new music anymore. I first heard about it in December’s audio issue of Fast Company.

Here’s the scoop. You create a new “radio station” based on an artist or a song. Pandora then suggests and plays similar songs. Unlike most online music recommendations, like those at Amazon or i-Tunes, which are based on other users preferences, Pandora uses song characteristics like “folk influences,” “major key tonality,” and “light vocal harmony” to pick the next song. As you listen to your station to can rate each song either as “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” Your feedback further refines the station’s criteria.

In what the company deems The Music Genome Project, Pandora employs a team of 32 professional musicians to listen to each song and record upto 400 musical attributes, or “genes” as they call them. This group culls through 10,000 new CDs each year, giving Pandora an expansive collection of songs and artists.

Because it operates as a radio station, Pandora cannot play specifically requested songs or allow you to replay tracks, however you can add any song through a click to “Your Favorites” list. This page allows you to memorialize the artists, song name, and date added for any track you want to follow up on. It also proved links to Amazon and i-Tunes incase you want to purchase the song.

The service is more or less free right now. There is an option to subscribe for $36 per year to turn off banner ads, but with an audio service, banner ads aren’t any sort of inconvenience. The free service lets you add up to 100 different stations.

I started using the site in January. So far I’ve set up 6 stations: Colin Hay, Vertical Horizon, Overkill (a Colin Hay song), Counting Crows, Pearl Jam, and Ryan Shupe & The Rubberband. I’ve added about 19 songs to my favorites list, including the afforementioned Joe Firstman which I heard on the Counting Crows station. Finding Joe alone has proved the service’s value to me.

While my tastes have steered towards the Alt Rock front, my boss has used it to find House music and he has been equally ecstactic.

And like that he was gone….

-Nate