Pandora-Nope, not an advert

For those of you who have trouble finding online music that matches your musical tastes, Pandora is for you. Seriously, this site is pretty slick. Basically, you create your own channel, by giving it a name of an artist or a song. Then the engine goes through and selects music by artists that are about the same style, or songs of the same style. You can also create multiple channels, which works out good for folks like me who have varying musical tastes based upon our mood. So far, the engine has been pretty accurate. It's part of the Music Genome Project. I'll quote from their site:

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.

Anyway, for those of you who are curious how good it works, give it a try. The more people who try it, the smarter it'll get, picking the right songs.

For those of you who have the musical tastes that may not fit into the mold, you may not find what you want here, but for those of us who are semi-mainstream, it works out pretty well.