Opening Pandora's Box

I was referred to Pandora today. it plays you a personal radio station where you can specify seed songs and artists and plays similar ones based on hundreds of attributes discovered in the Music Genome Project.

I just set up a channel based on The Orb. It's currently playing Moog Apella by 16B, all new to me but sounds great. I sent the channel to a fellow Orb fan. He said he really liked the track playing now, but it was different.

Was thinking it would be great if you could share channels on an ongoing basis. With such a wide library of tracks available, you'd think it could resolve disputes on what music to play in office environments. One person would play the music through their speakers (others could do if they wanted the sound closer to them). But everyone could rate the tracks that were coming through and put in a set number of request tracks for others to rate. The anonymity of the rating system would make it fair too; a secret ballot.

They should have a feature "combine channels" where different users select channels they want to hear and submit them. Then the system merges those to create something new, common and live. Would be great for being in the same space as remote workers.

A nice way of sharing for now is just to get visitors to enter their favourite tracks now into the same channel. I went round to this friend's place yesterday and we each took turns to name favourite songs. And yeah, a lot of the time the new songs played were to everyone's liking.

Next time I have a nice lady over, I'm going to ask her what her 3 favourite romantic songs are. First she'll be happy I have the song, then be amazed how close my taste is with other songs. It's this kind of technological edge that will ensure us geeks make a real impact on the genepool of generations to come.

My tip to Alexadex users. Buy Pandora and hold!

technorati tags: data mining   streaming radio   music mining   pandora music sharing