Learning from your mistakes

The lovely ladies of the Sad Dog Kansas City concert e-mail list were kind enough to turn me on to a new form of Internet radio today. Courtesy of the folks at the Music Genome Project, there is now Pandora.

The MGP is a group of folks who’ve spent the past five years quantifying songs and artists on specific qualities- much like the rankings and qualifiers you see over at the Allmusic Guide. However, rather than applying it to musical reviews, they’ve created an intuitive radio station.

You start out by inputting an artist or song that you like. It’ll then play a song by that artist, and based on the qualifiers that apply to that artist, branch out. Sometimes it doesn’t work so well. They didn’t have the Meteors in their database, so the psychobilly station I wanted to get going had to start with the Nekromantix, which sent it off in this weird branching based on “vamping.” I suppose I should count myself lucky that it picked dirty rockers the Cherry Valance and Throw Rag (both of whom I like quite a bit), rather than some mascara rock like My Chemical Romance.

However, were Pandora to pick something like MCR, you can tell it that you don’t like it, and it’ll move on and not play that song ever again. Which would be nice if the actual radio worked that way. Still, if you have a yen to try something new, and don’t mind a little interaction, you might end up with something that you really like- which I imagine is what they want, because you can get it ad-free if you pay…