Pandora, Can I Have Another Piece of Chocolate Cake?
One of the most interesting evolutions in online music for me is the rise of services last.fm and Pandora. Put simply, both sites take the music you like and find other tracks and artists you may also like, and play them to you as your own internet radio station.
Last.fm came about in 2002 as a social networking site, using AudioScrobbler to build a profile of your music taste. This is done either through the sites own streamed radio stations or by downloading a plugin for your media player. You sign up for a profile, download the plugin and start playing your music as usual. The details of each song played are sent back to last.fm who add it to your profile. After a while a picture builds up of your musical tastes and the social networking portion comes into its own.
You find yourself placed with neighbours who have similar tastes to you. You can play stations to discover music you might also like (neighbourhood radio), based on songs you loved on the last.fm player or launch a station based on similar artists to one you’ve selected. I’ve been using last.fm for over a year and really like the social portion. It’s a great and well focussed community, with the ability to add yourself as an attendee to an upcoming gig or chat with other fans of your favourite bands, as well as show off that you’ve listened to Tom Jones 155 times this week.
Recently I’ve found last.fm to be a little slow and decided to check out Pandora again. Pandora is sort of similar, but instead of recommendations uses the Music Genome Project - a musician listens to the track and analyses the elements to create the genome. When you visit Pandora and give an artist or track it’ll come back with the musical attributes and play similar tracks.
Part of the reason I stuck with last.fm for so long is that there seem to be a few more of my favourite artists there, and the forums which accompany them are mainly English, which is really nice as they’re mainly European artists. I tried them again and they’re still not there, but Oasis, Nerina Pallot and Foreigner came back with some great tracks. The selection seems more varied, and it’s not yet told me it can’t connect or that it’s run out of music.
A song going around in my head at the moment is Chocolate Cake by Crowded House. I stuck this in and for over an hour on two occasions haven’t skipped a single song - I’ve actually noted almost all of them as albums I’d like to find and hear more of.
So now if asked what my favourite music is, it can be summed up with a single released in 1991 that I don’t think even charted in the UK.
Pandora can also be played through a Squeezebox - a wireless device that plays internet stations and music on your PCs. If these devices come down in price like DAB sets and all sorts of Wi-Fi gear maybe they’ll even be on bedside tables and in showers. The future of radio is going to be fascinating, and it’ll be great if services like Pandora can step beyond the desktop and coexist in devices alongside a DAB tuner and MP3 player.
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