Music stores recomend one music based on very broad categories or genres. Amazon.com and other such online music outlets make recommendations based on common purchasing patterns (eg. people who bought this item also bought...).

But, I've recently learned of a new music recommendation engine. It was discussed on one of Leo Laporte's podcasts, Inside The Net.

Pandora.com has anylised millions of songs - popular and otherwise - and tagged them based on their musical 'genome'. Musicologists examine each song and log them based on numerous music attributes - major or minor, acoustic or electric or mixed, strong or mild use of harmony, etc.

Pandora.com, to my continued astonishment, will stream me endless music in the style of any song or band i choose to enter. By giving thumbs up or down to songs the stream becomes increasingly better at predicting my taste.

Here's the interface explaining why i'm being played a particular song:

It's free, aswell. Although, I have signed up for the deluxe version.

I think you'd best just go and listen to a stream i have customised based on the style of the group 'Zero 7' - http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh7033193

I love pandora.com so much I sent an email to the creator:

Dear Tim,

I signed up with Pandora as I was listening to your interview on Inside The Net, and i'm absolutely loving it.

One suggestion I came up with was that it might be cool to be able to create a station based directly on one or more of the music genome tags. It might be an opportunity for users to learn about music by selecting a tag (say 'extensive vamping') and then listening to what that might include.

Anyway, thanks heaps for the service.

Mark Brown

and to my surprise i got a reply:

Thanks a lot for the kind words and feedback, Mark - much appreciated.

I've shared your thoughts with the team. I'm pleased to see that you're interested in such detail around the music - our insane amount of analysis will not be in vain... The music genome definitely has the power to do what you're asking, and the idea of allowing users to specify particular musical attributes to hone their stations is something we're contemplating. We want to implement it in an elegant way that doesn't complicate the UI too much. We're going to be releasing a steady stream of new features over the coming months, so stay tuned. These comments really help us prioritize what we do.

Good to have you as a pandora listener.

Cheers,

Tim

Anyway, just go and try it. Be one of the trend setters.