Technology is AMAZING!

Hey, people -- is it just me who hadn't heard about Pandora.com?   If so, why didn't anyone TELL me about it??  In today's Wallstreet Journal Magazine there is an article describing how it works.  The moment I started reading about it I knew I had to go over there and give it a try immediately!    

For those of you who are as out of the mainstream as I apparently am, here's what it is.  Apparently for the last ten years Tim Westergren has been "mapping the DNA of music" and creating a massive "music genome project."  That is, he has identified 400 characteristics of each piece of music so that now - by entering an artist and/or a song you love - Pandora can identify other songs that you will also love.

So you begin by entering artists or songs that you really love.  Pandora maps the genome for each song or artist, then identifies similar songs/artists and plays them back to you.  You  then give each playback a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  If you say you don't like the song, it determines what it is that's different about that song from the one you said you loved and elimates music with those undesirable characteristics.  So . .. in the first 10 minutes it will probably play a number of things you may not like.  But as you continue to give your opinion of each song, the playbacks became better and better until now (an hour or so after I started), it hasn't played anything I don't like in the last 20 minutes!  And the wonderful thing is that a lot of the songs are music I had never heard before!  Wow! What a concept!  I absolutely LOVE it.

 

You can set up a number of different "stations," then combine them as you like depending upon what sort of music you're in the mood for at the moment. 

I'll tell you what, people, I am going to spend this evening figuring our how to hook up our home theater to the computer so I can REALLY enjoy this!  (It's also available as an iPhone app, I'm told, but I don't have one of those -- and probably wouldn't use it to listen to music if I did.)

This is another one of those things that make me wonder what amazing things are going to be coming up in the NEXT decade!   Yep -- technology is amazing.

FIY:  Pandora FAQs