thuston moore will be playing the part of satan...

Originally posted 2/13/06 - I just want to point out that I beat Nuvo's story by two days.

In my ongoing effort to find something to listen to at work that I'm not bored with, I discovered Pandora. Pandora works by taking one song title or artist (that you type into a nice flash interface) and formulating a complete musical picture (Pandora refers to them as stations) of what you want to listen to based off it.

Today I scrolled through my previously created stations (Ride Away (The Fall) Radio, Good Song (Blur) Radio, Randy Described Eternity (Built To Spill) Radio, Toxic (Britney Spears... I'm a master of this track in karaoke booths) Radio, Let Down (Radiohead) Radio) and decided to create something new. And thus Sonic Youth radio was born.

Pandora starts you out with a song from the artist that you've provided, and then immediately starts taking you places you may or may not have ever heard of. The idea is explained on the site:

Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.

We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.

And it all works surprisingly well. Sometimes it takes a little while for Pandora to stray off course, depending on how vanilla an artist you start with. I haven't tried starting with something like Norah Jones, but I can't imagine it gets too adventurous. In my case, from Sonic Youth it went to The Blackouts and The Faint, through Fugazi, John Frusciante, US Maple, past April Wine to.... Iron Maiden?

Now to be fair, even a friend recommending music will try to pull this sort of thing from time to time ("You like the Beatles? Have you heard Danzig?") so it's completely forgivable. And you can tell Pandora which songs or artists to never play again, which would be a useful feature on long car rides with other people when you don't have control of the radio.

Of course the one thing Pandora is missing is any sort of human interaction. If you want to know what song just played you have to click back over and look through the tracklist (instead of having a DJ tell you). There aren't any ads in between the music. All in all, it's about as good a system as you could want. Which probably means they'll be asking for donations in no time.

Ok, I've gotta go. It's playing Mudvayne.