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If you haven't heard of it, Pandora.com is a new music recommendation site based on the Music Genome Project. You simply tell it what songs or band you like, and with great accuracy Pandora will start playing some of the best music you never heard, all custom tailored to you. You can maintain different "stations" for your different genres, and constantly grade suggested music to whet Pandora's understanding of what you like. Or just plug in a favourite song and let the Flash-based player do it's thing.
What makes Pandora different is the Music Genome Project, which boils down to a bunch of professional musicians sitting around listening to music all day and classifying it with +200 different different musical qualities. These include things like vamping (extended improvisation over a repetitive chord or baseline), syncopation (offset drum beat), levels of vocal harmonies, instruments, "feel", and other attributes that you may not be aware of, but greatly affect your taste in music. When you tell Pandora what songs or bands you like, it goes through it's database and streams more music with similar qualities, which you can then rate to tell Pandora if it's going in the right direction.
This gives Pandora the upper hand over sites which suggest music based on market data or user suggestions, because these methods depend on the band initially having an audience to begin with, and already being popular with consumers and users. Using Pandora, you can find bands that have great music, and yet don't have a large enough following to have any mentions to be in the "Users who bought this also bought:" list on Amazon. This would make Pandora a music discovery site not only for listeners, but also for bands.
The FAQ for Pandora invites new bands to submit their music to the Music Genome Project to be listened to. If it's up to snuff, it will be integrated into Pandora, to be in the rotation for their genre with the rest, big or small. This is a great opportunity for bands to get out there and amass an audience.
Other features of Pandora include a "favourites" list to keep track of the songs you like the most, the ability to buy currently playing albums from Amazon with only a few clicks, a Flash based player for listening from virtually any computer, and the ability to have up to 100 different stations for your broad musical tastes. Not to mention that Pandora is free!
I suggest you try it out today.
