Pandora is a music service which streams music from the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project analyzes songs and attempts to classify them, similar to music fingerprinting. It assigns different variables such as "everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony." The way it works on Pandora is that you type in a song or artist you like. Pandora will then select that song, look up it's attributes, and create a radio station based on these. It will then play songs with similar attributes (or 'genes'). As you play music, you're able to give songs thumbs up and thumbs down, and you will be customizing your station as you listen.
Last.fm takes a more social stance on internet radio. As you listen to music, tracks are 'scrobbled' your profile. You're able to see what tracks you have listened to, and charts are created to show you your listening habits. As you add friends on Last.fm, you're able to see what they are listening to, recommend music, and see what your music compatibility is with them. You're able to listen to music from the site directly, or install a plugin on your computer to scrobble music from iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. It has some other nice features such as finding concerts in your area that you would like based on your preferences.
And here's the best part. Real-ity created Pandora.fm. It is a mashup of Pandora and Last.fm. You're able to listen to your Pandora stations and have the tracks scrobble to your Last.fm account. There are Firefox plugins which allow you to scrobble to Last.fm as well, however, Pandora.fm is nice because you can use it without downloading anything. This is what I use in lab primarily.
If you have any questions, let me know, but otherwise enjoy the music. If you use Last.fm already, feel free to add me as a friend.
Godspeed.
[Comments: 0] [Tags: music]
