Solid Geekery

“You should check this out…”

I can’t remember how many times someone that I’ve met has recommended a new band, television show, or movie and said that it seems like the type of thing that I’d like. Sometimes I like this new thing, but often I am just not interested. The problem is that taste in entertainment is such a personal thing that it can be hard to know what another person will enjoy. Surely there should be some way to classify things like music to make it easier to find what interests me.

A group called the Music Genome Project is working to make that a reality. It is a group of music lovers who came up with an idea to catalog music in a way similar to the genome used to catalog DNA. They identified all the different components that make up music and standardized them so that any song can be codified. The members of the project have cataloged thousands of songs and stored them in a database. While it is great to be able to store all this data about songs, how does it help the average person find music similar to what they enjoy?

On the radio

The answer is Pandora. It is an internet radio site created by the same people who started the Music Genome Project. Users can create their own radio stations by entering the name of a band or song that they like. If a record is found in the database, it is used to find music with similar characteristics. Pandora has an interactive display that lists the name of the song, band, album, and even cover art if it is available. For each song, the user can provide feedback whether they like or dislike the song, and that information is used to refine the search for similar music.

I’ve personally been using Pandora for almost a year, and I’ve found there are several things you can do to improve the chances that it will find music that you actually like.

• If you like almost all the music that a band has produced, then use the name of the band to start the radio station. If there is a band you like, but you don’t like some of their songs, then define the radio station from whichever of their songs is your favorite. You can also define a radio station from multiple songs from different artists.
• If there is one song that is an exception to a general rule, don’t give that song a thumbs up. I generally dislike live versions of songs unless I heard the live version before I heard the studio version. I made the mistake of adding a live version of a song I liked to one of my stations. After that I got a lot of live versions of songs. It took almost a week of giving thumbs down to all the live songs that came up before Pandora stopped selecting them.
• Because Pandora is a free service, they make their money from the advertisements on their site. One consequence of this is that you can only skip past so many songs at a time because they pay royalties for each song that plays. This can make it difficult when you are first setting up a station because it may play a few songs in a row that you dislike. If you run into the problem that you can’t skip any more songs, don’t get discouraged. It usually takes at least a week before Pandora has enough information to consistently pick songs that you’ll enjoy.
• If there is a song that you like but has been played so much that you’ve grown tired of it, you can tell Pandora to not play it for a month. That way it still is used to find new songs, but you don’t have to listen to it for a while or skip it every time it plays.

I have one station that I started when I first found out about Pandora that I’ve been giving feedback on songs for months. It plays a lot of songs that I’ve already heard and given the thumbs up, but it also finds lots of new songs that I’ve not heard before. It’s helped me find at least three new artists that I enjoy, and if I ever get tired of the music I’m currently listening to, I can just create a new station and find something else I want to listen to. One of the biggest benefits is that unlike with one of my friends, I don’t have to feel embarrassed when I tell it that I didn’t like the song that it was sure I would love.