This weekend I have been enjoying the Pandora music player that Scoble has been gushing about all week.
This has been a surprising amount of fun. Type in a random artist or song and get a stream of similar songs. Right now I'm listening to the "Lindsay Lohan" station.(1)
I haven't done too much customization to the playlists. You can add additional songs or artists to the station, or ask for more or less songs like the currently playing song. I wonder what kind of an impact this would have on the playlist, and whether or not it will be used as input to some sort of collaborative filtering system to supplement the data from the Music Genome Project.
I also don't really get the "community" features they are trying to expose, such as sharing stations. Since you can't select future songs, what does it really mean to share a station when your friends just create their own station with the same inputs?
Still, it is really nice to be able to tune into a stream of music, without commercial interruptions or annoying DJ's, selected to complement whatever mood I happen to be in. Although there are some obvious choices, I've been enjoying a lot of music from groups I had never heard of and, without the service, most likely never would have heard. I haven't been compelled to click on the "buy from iTunes" or "buy from Amazon" links, but you never know....
On a final note: mild rhythmic syncopation rulez!(2)
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(1)That was probably too much personal information. Sorry about that.
(2)I don't think I have yet heard Pandora play me a song that hasn't had mild rhythmic syncopation as on of its characteristics. I guess my musical tastes must be fairly limited.
