Music Surgey

Don’t you hate it when you want to listen to some music, but you can’t find exactly what you want? Or perhaps you’re just sick of an album or a playlist that you keep listening to. Do you go through an IPod, click click clicking…up and down…wondering hmmm…how come you can't find something to listen to, when there is so much music!

I think it’s a problem with the way we still think about music. We are boxed into a set tracks of an album. So, we created collections. Burned/taped them and shared them. Wow, what an idea, which now is really old, and replicating it into playlists is both a chore and still restrictive.

Even with suggestions from a friend, staff at a store, or websites, playlists are still restrictive, and there is a lot of wasted efforts with them.

Anyway, enough with the negatives.

Have you heard about Pandora (see right column)? It’s the first application from the Music Genome Project. Basically, they are a group of music enthusiast that came up with a great idea to create a classification system for music.

They thought of breaking down music to its constituent parts. Similar to DNA and its constituent genes. They claim that they came up with hundreds of these parts to analyse music.

Similar to the Human Genome Project, they started to create a database over the past 6 years of thousands of tracks and their attributes.

Now, they released a dynamic and learning application that acts like a streaming radio station.

With a very simple and straightforward design, you just type in a track or an artist, and it will dynamically create a music station based on these music "genes." Later on, you can keep adding suggestions, and even give each track a thumbs up/down to let the station focus on your mood.

Give it a try! Pandora. Or try the stations I created and shared on the right column.

There is a free option, which restricts the times you skip music.

Enjoy :)