A Database Makes for Cool Radio Listening

For the last few weeks I have been listening to Pandora Radio on my computer.  Pandora is a very simple web based application that provides you with free access to music that you like.  Music lovers who want to hear a specific song will not find Pandora to their liking, but if you want cool background music while working on your computer than try out Pandora!

The Pandora player is a free Web-based Flash application. You don’t need to download anything to use it as long as you have a recent version of Flash installed on your computer.  Pandora delivers a 128Kbps stream of music so you will need a broadband connection.

To get started you identify some songs or artists that you like.   Then Pandora picks songs that you should like.  Pandora’s suggestions rely on a database of 400 musical attributes covering the qualities of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, composition and lyrics. The information comes from the Music Genome project that began in January 2000 and took 30 experts in music theory five years to complete.

Now Pandora has some limitations.  First, Pandora will never play a specific song on demand though it will show up eventually.   Also, you can only skip 10 songs in an hour — this is so you can’t just skip to the song you’re looking for.  Their license also limits the number of times Pandora can play a particular song or artist in a particular time period.

I like the background music while on the Internet at no cost.  Plus I love the concept of a recommendation database of music – and so far the recommedations have been pretty good.  I think Pandora knows more about my musical tastes than I do!