What? Sorry, I was listening to Pandora.
If you walk into the Mindfly design studio—with a snazzy, new desk configuration to maximize workspace and create a more collaborative work environment—and say hello, it might take a moment for anyone to respond. We don’t mean to be rude. We’re all just busy making and running websites. We also have our headphones jammed in our ears and plugged into our computers because we’re listening to Pandora.
Founder Tim Westergren and a group of musicians started the Music Genome Project began back in 2000. The idea was to analyze and classify music based on “melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony” (About the Music Genome Project®). With tens of thousands of artists and song classified, the Pandora radio service was launched in 2005.
Go to Pandora and enter the name of an artist or a song. A radio station is created, selecting other songs with musical attributes similar to your request. You can then further design the station by adding more artists to the mix, and by giving songs a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to help Pandora better tailor a station to suit your tastes.
Since it is a free radio service (a paid subscription is also available), there are a couple limitations because of licensing restrictions. It’s currently only available for residents in the United States. You can’t rewind or replay a song, but you can skip or pause music. Pandora is also not allowed to play a particular song or artists on demand. But if you’re just dying to hear a certain song again, they provide quick links to iTunes and Amazon so you can purchase the song or album.
I test the true of the effectiveness of a Pandora station based on how closely it can emulate my iPod playlists. Why not just listen to iTunes then? Because I like the fact that Pandora stations also throw out some music by artists I haven’t heard of, but that they think I’ll like based on my previous requests.