IGX

I've been listening to free pandora.com radio for a few weeks and it is great. At first I listened to its genre stations, which contain a wide range of music in each genre. My favorite so far is the classical jazz station, which has all the early greats and some who I did not know.

I then decided to explore more of what pandora offers. The premise of the station is that it has created the music genome showing where each piece of music lies in the genome. You pick one or more artists for your station, and they'll play that artist and those with the same musical genomics. So far I've created a few single artist stations but haven't blended them yet.

Johny Cash got me Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, etc. Fantastic. Bob Seger did not work so well. For some reason, the genome connected him to a lot of what I consider bubble gum rock and roll. Debussy got me a wide range of early tonal 20th century composers, the familiar and the unfamiliar. John Coltrane was the best yet, with a wide assortment of jazz giants from the 50's and 60's linked by having solo sax, trumpet, piano, bop influence, driving rythyms, panes of music. Bach got me an assortment of baroque music, but Bach so outshines all the others that the format suffered from including the others.

If you hear a piece you don't like, you veto it and they take it from your personal station, which I think represents a permanent preference. Then there's a whole social fabric to the site, where you can see who else is listening to your artist and what other artists they have as stations. There's also all sorts of informations on the composers or artists and on how the music fits into the genome.

It was okay for me, but I have discovered that often, all the roads lead back to Top 40.

Pete:

It's because outside of Michigan and Ohio, Bob Seger isn't really understood as well, and everyone's all going off of Live Bullet instead of "that time I saw Seger play with Willy and Mike down at Mick's barbeque back in 1972" and stuff like that.

Growing up here, Seeger was the real deal, raw, gritty, personal. But I think that's true even if you didn't follow him up close growing up. I'd think that the genome folks would have put in a raw and gritty gene to keep Seeger in a different family tree from pudding rock and roll.

Put in John Hammond, and you will get a great blues channel. Do it.

Schlegel wrote:Put in John Hammond, and you will get a great blues channel. Do it.

Cool. Have you heard "Wicked Grin," his album of Tom Waits covers?

Yep. He played some selections from it at a show here last year, in a tiny little annex of a church. Maybe 75 people, and we were packed like sardines. Great show, filled in with stories about bluesmen and the their songs.

I put in Hansen and all I got was a bunch of boy band shit.

I think they have some deal where they can't stream certain artists.

Anyway, when I work, I like Baroque music playing softly. (Can't have anything with words when I'm trying to come up with words.) The Johan Sebastian Bach channel is the cat's ass. I have Pandora set to Bach in my tool bar.