Pandora

Music lovers, take note! Pandora (pandora.com) is a great music-listening website with minimal commercial interruption. Here’s how it works.
After creating your user profile (not necessary for previewing the site), you name a genre, song, or artist that you particularly enjoy. Pandora then creates a radio station with that genre, song, or songs by that artist and similar songs. You have a list of radio stations that are kept separate, and you can create a quickmix station that plays music from the chosen stations on your list. For each song that plays, you can give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, bookmark the song or the artist, buy the song, and get tons of info about the song or artist (lyrics, bio, similar artists, and more). There are a bunch more features, but you’ll just have to check out the site to see them.

Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project, a music analysis endeavor described by its founder like this -

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

Since we started back in 2000, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

The result? You really hear music you like! For example, I created a quickmix station from four stations: Pat Benetar, Johnny Cash, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Brandi Carlile (four artists who would never have their songs played on the same radio station!). I listened to great music for hours, heard much more than is in my personal collection, and discovered some new songs and artists that I happen to really enjoy.

And for the technophiles out there, note that Pandora works not only on the computer, but also on an iPod Touch, an iPhone, and a Blackberry. For all-around town, non-stop grooving.