I found this website that creates streaming radio based on songs or artists that you give it. I've been very surprised at how much stuff I have found on it that I like and have never heard of.... particularly by putting in older music that I am a little familiar with but definitely don't know of other artists who were not mainstream. Check it out. Pandora - Music Genome Project
I started using Pandora about six months ago. It's awesome. The only bad part is that you can only skip about 10 songs every hour and then you have to wait awhile before you can start again. But, it is a very cool way to find cool new music.
I started using it a few months ago. And at first I loved it. I used it as my standard streaming music station at work. But after a while I noticed that the playlist gets pretty static after a while. I guess the point is that you're supposed to keep refining your tastes in order to it to take you into different directions. But I don't want to go through the effort. They have a potentially intriguing "sharing" feature, but last I checked it was only from direct friends that you email or the top 10 most shared stations. If they had a feature where you could browse through a bunch of popular stations and build up the community/audience like that, I bet the site's popularity would go through the roof.
This is officially the best website ever. I did an 'Explosions in the Sky' search and discovered bands like Six Parts Seven, El Ten Eleven, and Saxon Shore. No way would I have ever discovered these bands without this site.
Oh, man. Just typed in Miles Davis and I'm pretty much set for the rest of the day. See you guys tomorrow...
If you hit the 'guide us' button and then the "I want to add more kinds of music' and put in 4 or 5 genre's it will vary the program style...keeps it a little more interesting.
here's a pretty good, but rather long article about projects such as pandora. i know there are some fans of pitchfork on this board, so some of you may have already read it. i pulled this thread up because it was posted before the one today (however, i think there was one even earlier.) http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/features/weekly/06-05-22-better-than-we-know-ourselves.shtml
I love Pandora, I listen all day at work when I'm not listening to Phil Hendrie. Is there a site out there that you can type in an band/artist and it just plays songs by that particular artist only?
I think their main issue is not to categorize by a time frame or by a non-musical reference point. They want to try and find out what elements of a song and performance make you want to listen - vocal harmonies, minor chord progression, etc. They are searching for the key elements to songs and time frame is irrelevant in that search.
I don't really pay attention to those comments. They seem very 'canned' to me. Half the time, they talk about minor chord progressions when the chord progressions are actually major. With that being said, I know it's impossible to always be exactly right when there are so many songs in their database. It's still a great site that keeps me busy for hours.
Sorry to revive this old thread, but I just discovered this site, and I was about to post a thread about it. To be extra-thorough I did a search and found this thread. Man, this site rocks! I don't think it's going to hurt to tell more people about it. I've discovered so many great songs/bands already in just a week or so.
By the way, and this is why I love my wife so much, in response to the thread that was going on earlier this week, my wife suggested that I use a "Nickelback" song for my station and see what happened. Sure enough, the first song that came up was ANOTHER Nickelback song. Priceless!
