Pandora's Music Box

When I worked as a manager of a CD store, I was introduced to a wide range of artists spanning a wide range of genres. Some were actually good, and others were quite terrible. Aside from serving as a walking version of name-that-tune, people would often ask for musical suggestions. The most common questions were "I love [insert Artist] and have all their albums but I'm looking for new music... can you suggest someone similar?"

Each and every time, I'd suggest they check out The Music Genome Project at www.pandora.com. This site was created back early 2000.

What is the Genome Project? (Straight from the website)

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.

So basically a user could enter in the artist or song they enjoy, and Pandora will make a playlist of similar artists/songs that match your taste. With everything from mainstream to obscure garage bands, Pandora's accuracy was very impressive.

Now for the bad news.

In the U.S. there is a federal statute called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that provides this license for all the music you hear on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. As a result, if the IP address of your computer isn't an American address, you won't make it much further than a splash screen apologizing for restricting access. The folks at Pandora state they plan to make this a global service, but until Canada can come up with our own DMCA, we're on the outside looking in.