Pandora

Pandora.com

Bryan told me about this and I think it's one of the coolest things ever.

Pandora is pretty much like a custom streaming radio station. You type in a name of a favorite song or band, it finds similar songs and bands, and streams it for you. You can create your own account and save your stations. For example, I typed in "The Killers" and it brought an endless list of songs and bands that sounded similar.

There are similar sites like Pandora, but they mostly rely on other users' recommendations. Pandora, however, uses sound and lyric analysis to differentiate music. Pandora was created by the "Music Genome Project."

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.

In the end, you discover bands that suit your style that you never have heard before. You also can click on these bands, find out more information about them, and be able to buy their records.

Currently, you can only run Pandora in the web browser and you cannot fast forward within a song. Hopefully, Pandora will become its own standalone music player.