Be your own DJ

I may be late to this particular party, but this past weekend, I discovered the joys of such music service websites as Last FM and Pandora Radio. These allow you to create a quasi radio station that plays on the computer, with you, the listener, selecting the initial genre/artists, and with the program then playing continuous content within that framework. It is brilliant and deeply satisfying, and the polar opposite of what corporate/bland programming driven commercial radio has become.

Pandora is the creation of something called the Music Genome Project, which attempts to describe songs via their attributes - a very ambitions project indeed (but, if the proof of this method is in the product, the method seems to be working). As Wikipedia explains,

A given song is represented by a vector (a list of attributes) containing approximately 150 "genes" (analogous to trait-determining genes for organisms in the field of genetics). Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Rock and pop songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, and jazz songs have approximately 400. Other genres of music, such as world and classical, have 300–500 genes. The system depends on a sufficient number of genes to render useful results. Each gene is assigned a number between 1 and 5, in half-integer increments.

Given the vector of one or more songs, a list of other similar songs is constructed using a distance function.

To create a song's genome, it is analyzed by a musician in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per song. Ten percent of songs are analyzed by more than one technician to ensure conformity with the standards, i.e., reliability.

The technology is currently used by Pandora to play music for Internet users based on their preferences. Because of licensing restrictions, Pandora is available only to users whose location is reported to be in the USA by Pandora's geolocation software

Using this then, I have created a series of genre stations, based on style of music and named, in each instance for a representative artist of a particular genre/style. Thus, I have my punk station (Saints radio), my indie rock station (Pastels radio) my worldbeat station (Fela radio, though it seems to mostly give me reggae), etc. Right now, it's early morning, and I am wanting mostly folky acoustic tunes, so I have on my "Townes Van Zandt Radio" site; I've this heard Bob Dylan, Donovan, Meic Stevens, Johnny Copland, Jandek, Vic Chesnutt, Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, Ramblin Jack Elliott, Doc Watson, Charlie Poole, Mississippi John Hurt, Alex Kash, and Eric Von Schmidt. It's been wonderful to hear artists whom I love, and to discover a few new ones along the way. And if I should decide that I want to own a copy of the recording, Pandora easily allows me to make a purchase. So, Amazon, ITunes, and my favorite commercial free music stations are now all together under one (electronic) roof.

Incidentally, last week, I happen to swing by a Virgin megastore in lower Manhattan, and while it was open and pretty busy, it felt like something on it's way out.CD megastores may be facing extinction - and as an embodiment of some old, now obsolete music industry practices, parhaps that is not an altogether bad thing, merely a sign of the evolution of things; as is Pandora Radio.