Cool--and legal--Online Music

Pandora--a new online music discovery service--provides you with suggested listening on your own stations. If you've ever had a friend who has said something like, "Okay, if you like The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," then you probably will like The Byrds' 'The Times They Are A-Changin''" . . . then you've got the basic concept of how Pandora works.

The creators say,

For almost six years now, we have been hard at work on the Music Genome Project. It's the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Together our team of thirty musician-analysts have been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more - close to 400 attributes! We continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country.

We've now created an interface to make this available to music lovers so they could use this musical 'connective-tissue' to discover new music based on songs or artists they already know.

The result is a cool interface--Pandora--which keeps the music coming on your computer. nHumanities tried it with our '60s pops favorites, and we're happily bopping along in the past.