Music Genome Project & Pandora

A couple of things:

First, I have just discovered the Music Genome Project, and Pandora. In January 2000 the MGP started as a way to catalog music in a very thorough, non-commercialized way.
Instead of taking a genre or a label and categorizing the artists accordingly, the project has gone out of its way to be blind to those labels and create their own based on vocal style, rhythm, lyrics, arrangement. Attributes inherent in the music itself, not in its packaging are used to categorize songs.

As someone who has a massively eclectic music collection, playlists for every mood, and the personal belief that life has a soundtrack, this project and Pandora, forgive the pun, spoke volumes to me.

There is a very organic component to categorization and cataloging. It is one of the fundamental aspects of humanity, to organize, even haphazardly and without clear understanding of what rules we personally are using to do so.

Pandora as a player has a simple and elegant interface. You start by choosing an artist/song and build a station off of it. You can start with just one, and Pandora will start streaming. You tweak using a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system, and an extra "Add to favorites" if you *really* like a song. The song then goes to a handy XML list on another page linked to your account. Thumbs-up/Thumbs-down is a little extreme for me - sometimes I kinda like a song, so I usually just leave it alone - pretty sure I'll hear it again and can make a firmer decision later.

If you don't want to listen to a song, and you don't want to give it thumbs-down, there's a "next" button.

Pandora is free to use, but a subscription option is available.

This was supposed to be a short post - and include some actual librarian stuff - but so much for plans ;). OK - that just means I'll have something to post tomorrow.

-C