Dave’s Rants

Last weekend I saw my first mention of Pandora, I think it was on Scoble’s blog. Initially I thought, hmm, Last.fm does that already so I wasn’t particularly enthused by it but when I saw people who had tried both saying there was no comparison I was intrigued. So I headed off to the Pandora website and applied for an invite and then promptly forgot about it.

This morning I woke up to an invite and decided to go and check it out, I’ve been blown away so far, absolutely and utterly blown away. Usually these kinda things just give you artists based on common preferences of other users, or loosely based on genre but in this case it gives you it based on the actual content of the song. For example:

Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features hard rock roots, mild rhythmic syncopation, melodic songwriting, major key tonality and a clear focus on recording studio production.

I don’t think it gets much more specific than that! I’ve also included some screenshots here to give you a proper feel for the site.

So to begin as shown in the image above you enter the song or artist you start off, this is immediately where this differs from last.fm and the others. Usually these music engines just base recommendations on the artist but Pandora realises that one artists can have loads of different sounds, some you like some you don’t.

Since Mylo was my surprise choice last week I decided to do a search on him, as you can see above it works away……

And it finds a result, it starts to play a similar song, sometimes it will play a song from the artist you searched for but sometimes the Licences they have don’t allow that.

If you get an artist you don’t like it’s pretty easy to tell it that you didn’t like the song

So if it generates a song from an Artist you never heard of there are lots of things you can do with it, the only problem it becomes too easy to spend a load of money on the iTunes Music Store!

But seriously, I definitely recommend you go and check it out and try and get an invite!

Update 23 August 2005 12:15 GMT: I just figured out how to invite people so just ask me for one if you want one.