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Underground > Radio & Music >

Pandora Radio - Folksonomic radio action?

ONLY NICE THINGS

16:28 / 07.09.05

Pandora - the Music Genome Project's radio station.

The idea of Pandora is sort of inspired - you use its relational database as the back-end, and whack a media player at the front end. So, somebody types in a favourite song or artist and it plays a bunch of music related to it.

It's an interesting idea, especially since a bad boy or girl could theoretically hijack the stream audio and have free mixes. Even wiithout, $36 a year stacks up reasonably well... although not being able to go back to previous songs (presumably to frustrate hijackers) is a bit irksome.

How does it do? Well, it didn't recognise Final Fantasy (the band, not the album), but I asked for M.I.A and got this playlist:

Walk the Line - Dani Siciliano
Fire Bam (Diplo Mix) - M.I.A
Ghetto - Supreme Beings of Leisure
Sunshowers - M.I.A
That's the Way I Like It - Offer Nissim
Don't you wanno fly - Debra Michaels
Walk the Line (Again)
Pull Up the People - M.I.A
Very - Moby
Sex Rebel - XLover
If you're gonna jump - Paul Oakenfold
Afterall - GB

At which point I think it crashed. That's not a bad variety, considering that there aren't that many things that sound like M.I.A - There's a nice filter mechanism where you can ask why a sing has been selected and it will give you a list of characteristics of the song - presumablty its tags.

I guess question one is "is this legal", which I'm not totally sure about. Secondly, is it any good? Your first ten hours are free, so hopefully some idea of the depth of its catalogue can be worked out. You have options to buy on iTunes, but I don't know whether that means it can theoretically access any song on iTunes - there must be a bottleneck at the taqgging - for example nobody has presumably tagged a Final Fantasy song yet...

*

21:09 / 07.09.05

So is this better than last.fm, which I nearly gave up on but which seems to have significantly improved their service in the last few months, including adding tags? I'm intrigued, but not yet convinced.

20:30 / 17.07.06

*bump*

I just discovered this a couple of days ago, and I have to say that I'm completely sold. I don't know if the user interface has been upgraded since the inception of this thread, but it's extremely slick and I've already discovered at least three bands that definitely merit deeper investigation.

20:39 / 17.07.06

It is a great idea, but I tried it several months ago with Hot Snakes and got loads of stuff I didn't very much like thereafter. As I recall, it didn't even give me some Drive Like Jehu, which - given the bands share a member - shouldn't be too tenuous. I may have got some Rocket from the Crypt, though, for same reason.

12:57 / 18.07.06

I'm liking it a lot so far. I'm only on the free version, but I can't see any restrictions, and I'm sure I've played it for more than 10 hours already. It comes through my work firewall as well. There's some way of emailing our channels to each other isn't there? we should do that.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:10 / 18.07.06

I like its analysis of the music. "Challenging instrumental passage" = "the guitar Solo from War Pigs".

It's a neat idea, and works pretty well. Though I was a little upset that it kept giving me Green Day and stuff starting from British anarcho-punk. Only a little, though.

22:46 / 18.07.06

Falconer -

The nice thing is that you can always add a number of bands and it will update its mix. The same goes for the way that it adjusts the playlist based upon whether you give each song thumbs-up/thumbs-down. It's adaptive - I'm not surprised that you didn't get an ideal mix straight off. Also, you can change the station as you go along by going back and removing influences to push the mix in one direction or another.

I've been playing with a mix between Wumpscut, Frontline Assembly, Shriekback and Men Without Hats with great success.

00:24 / 19.07.06

Yeah, I think I tried mixing in some Wu-Tang, and that just confused the issue altogether. I'll give it another go sometime soon.

jentacular dreams

17:18 / 19.07.07

*bump*

Pandora's UK service to close, though the US side of things may make it through.

Will this have any beneficial effect on falling CD sales, or will the slack merely be taken up through downloads and CDRs?

14:26 / 20.07.07

i've got several radio stations on pandora, with mixed results. i think it can be a crapshoot because the defining factors of why you like an artist or song sometimes cannot be broken up into parts like "major key tonality" with "excessive vamping" - so periodically songs come up in the mix that bear to resemblance to anything i would ever like. but for what its worth, i have 5 stations that reflect, or are attempting to at any rate, my random taste in music - from folk to electronic and middle eastern to metal. i like the jeff buckley/leonard cohen station, and the niyaz station the best. at the very least it staves off musical ennui.