Music Out Of The Box

Pandora is an interesting music project that lets you create your own "radio" station with your favourite artists. It also appears to analyze your music taste in an innovative and surprisingly accurate fashion so you can get to know more music you might enjoy. Here is what they say about their Music Genome Project, the backbone of the service:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

I created my own little test radio station, Barley Radio. Let's see, oh, it is just playing Neil Diamond, maybe it needs a little more finetuning ...

The service is free to test, stays free if you register with an e-mail address and also has a subscription option if you want to get rid of the (unobtrusive) ads.