Finding new music with Pandora
I'm always on the search for new music, and a friend recently sent a link to a music recommendation service. Having tried a number of Amazon-style collaborative filter sites over the years, I was relatively skeptical. Pandora, however, quickly won me over.
Pandora invites you to create a 'radio station' based on an artist or genre of your choice, and then plays music it thinks you'll like. My current tastes run somewhere between ambient elecrontica and IDM -- a genre rife with crap and limited shelf-life sounds. A good challenge for such a service, I figured.
I entered Lemonjelly to start, a group I had been listening to on my iPod, and was quickly presented with a number of interesting tracks to listen to. Pandora does a number of things well -- you don't have to log in and register to do anything, the interface is straightforward (particularly for a Flash app), and it's easy to give feedback.
Ulrich Schnauss immediately caught my attention, as did a complilation called "OST: Original Block Party Edits". I've subsequently purchased both albums. There's no question that I'm going to double my music spending this year, particularly due to my recent failure to cancel a free Amazon Prime membership. What's a few bucks for some good music, now that I've prepaid the shipping? (Bezos, you bastard!!)
One major difference between Pandora and other recommendation systems (particularly collaborative filters) is that it appears to be based on extensive human categorization of music. You can get a hint of this when creating a new station -- for Funkadellic, it says, for example:
If your tastes run towards broader mainstream genres -- Rush, U2, the Beatles -- I'm told that you have to rate quite a few songs before it starts getting good, but I'm finding a 25-50% hit rate in electronica. The Funkadellica station I just created, for example, played Peter Frampton. I can see the connection, but it's not the direction I'm going for.
Two potentially frustrating aspects of Pandora its Flash interface (no Linux support last I checked), and the limited number of songs you can skip. The skipping limitation is attributed to a licensing issue, but I think license holders would be well-advised to cut these guys some slack, and let the money flow.
Pandora invites you to create a 'radio station' based on an artist or genre of your choice, and then plays music it thinks you'll like. My current tastes run somewhere between ambient elecrontica and IDM -- a genre rife with crap and limited shelf-life sounds. A good challenge for such a service, I figured.
I entered Lemonjelly to start, a group I had been listening to on my iPod, and was quickly presented with a number of interesting tracks to listen to. Pandora does a number of things well -- you don't have to log in and register to do anything, the interface is straightforward (particularly for a Flash app), and it's easy to give feedback.
Ulrich Schnauss immediately caught my attention, as did a complilation called "OST: Original Block Party Edits". I've subsequently purchased both albums. There's no question that I'm going to double my music spending this year, particularly due to my recent failure to cancel a free Amazon Prime membership. What's a few bucks for some good music, now that I've prepaid the shipping? (Bezos, you bastard!!)
One major difference between Pandora and other recommendation systems (particularly collaborative filters) is that it appears to be based on extensive human categorization of music. You can get a hint of this when creating a new station -- for Funkadellic, it says, for example:
- To start things off, we'll play a song that exemplifies the style of Funkadellic, which is features flat out funky grooves, meandering melodic phraing, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, extensive vamping and electric pianos
If your tastes run towards broader mainstream genres -- Rush, U2, the Beatles -- I'm told that you have to rate quite a few songs before it starts getting good, but I'm finding a 25-50% hit rate in electronica. The Funkadellica station I just created, for example, played Peter Frampton. I can see the connection, but it's not the direction I'm going for.
Two potentially frustrating aspects of Pandora its Flash interface (no Linux support last I checked), and the limited number of songs you can skip. The skipping limitation is attributed to a licensing issue, but I think license holders would be well-advised to cut these guys some slack, and let the money flow.
posted by $!# at 3/20/2006 08:15:00 PM
1 Comments:
Oh, Ulrich Schnauss caught *your* attention, huh? Ha ha.
I find the very-human-tagged system exemplified by Pandora theoretically limiting, but have to admit that, in practice, it seems to better the other systems I've tried. I've run into a bit of a brick wall though, where it seems like the more I attempt to tune a radio station, the less useful the results are. I can put up with that.
It seems like this sort of analysis -- based on tempi, vocal style, and so on -- only works really well for particular bands and performers, who have a consistent style, as you mentioned. But how would you characterize Dylan in the way they characterize Funkadelic? Well, do you mean early Dylan, transitional self-mocking Dylan, mid-period 70s Dylan, fucked-up born-again Dylan, 80s whiny Dylan, current resurgent Dylan? If you mean early, well, do you mean protest Dylan, chanelling-Woody-Guthrie-Dylan, joking-Dylan, singing-fuck-you-to-an-ex-lover-Dylan...? All of those can have completely different tempi, meter, vocal style, verse structure, and instrumental make-up. This model seems to break down when you're after people with widely divergent personal styles, but seems to work really well if you're after, say, "chill-out music."
The other thing that just pisses me off about them is that they don't index any Classical at all. Bastards.
Still, I've found more new music through these guys than any other online recommendation system ever.
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