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Hey LDGuy, Funny you should bring this up. A friend of mine knows these people and had referred to this site as a place where her work was categorized, etc. I was impressed, and think it's a cool effort.
Since this is a Bay Area company, another friend of mine (also a musician, and MBA who works for a venture capital firm in the area) had been involved in the VC end of this and a competing product, http://www.soundflavor.com/ and staged what he referred to as a "bake-off" between the two services. His words: "Both based on the same theory of being able to objectively classify key characteristics of a song using a data model of specific metrics...and then training musically-astute staff to rate songs quickly and accurately with said data model." There are problems involved in this, of course, in that subjective elements of music are not classifiable. Witness our "groove" and feel discussions, and our "who's more musical: Animal from the Muppets or Virgil Donati" type discussions here at HOD.
Apparently, Pandora found that licensing their engine to a company like, say, MTV was difficult to make work, so stuck with a "personal XML player" type model, which is unfortunately limited by the rather byzantine rules of digital licensing, "( e.g. 'thou shalt recommend songs by the same artist more than 3 times...thine users may not skip ahead more than 3 songs, etc.')". His opininion was that Soundflavor, who *are* going after the making an engine they can license to places like MTV, gets it "more" right.
<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ January 09, 2006 01:27 PM: Message edited by: spaceotter ]</font>
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I've tried it before. I put in Steely Dan and, except for some more Dan and some Doobies, I got all kinds of crappy music I would never listen to.
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That Pandora is crap. I tried it and after about 7 songs I was listening to horrible Kenny-G style Fuzak garbage. No thanks.....
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A mate showed me this - www.pandora.com - a great site for learning about music. All you do is input the mane of a band or artist you like, and it then comes up with all this stuff which is similar, yet different, that you might also like. You end up building up this "station" of this type of music, which you can go back and listen to whenever you like. You get offered up all this music you've never heard, which you can then research and buy if you want to, or just skip if you dont like it much. I reckon this in conjunction with www.allmusic.com and amazon are all you need to be musical genius!
Check em out!
<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ January 09, 2006 12:17 PM: Message edited by: LDGuy ]</font>
