This is very, very cool. Tell Pandora.com what music you’re into and it’ll create a radio station based around your specific tastes. And we mean specific.

You type in the name of a band or song you like and Pandora will play you songs of that ilk. What’s even better is that it learns – add more songs and more bands, and if it comes up with a dud you can give it the thumbs down and it’ll never play anything like it again. Your listening experience becomes even more personal the more you listen.

What makes Pandora different is that it’s not confined to genre – that’s
been done a million times before. Apparently, every song from the Billboard Chart since the 50s, along with copious amounts of indie
rock and jazz, has been classified according to a combination of 400 musical
attributes, from ‘tempo’ to ‘rhythmic syncopation’. You know – rhythmic
syncopation.

As a tester we made a Big Brother station, and said we liked Dead Or Alive, The Ordinary Boys and Goldie Lookin’ Chain. The first song Pandora played for us was El Chupa Nibre by Danger Doom, "because it features acoustic hat, prominent horns, a dry recording
sound and thin orchestration." Never heard of it before, but it was
pretty good – and we’ve always been fans of ‘prominent horns’, except on
buses when you don’t want people to see, or in front of an old lady.

Scarily, it actually works. Now that websites know better than we
do what music we like, is it that big a step to the robot revolution
and the enslavement of the entire human race? We hope not, but we
don’t have all the answers – only most of them.

Pandora certainly has its benefits. For starters you can now be the cool
guy in the pub who keeps discovering new bands, and you won’t have to
listen to fat Chris Moyles being fat anymore either.  Everybody wins
(except fat Chris Moyles, who doesn’t deserve it anyway because he’s
fat).

Pandora is free. Get there.

Try out Pandora for yourself now

[story by Matt Cook]