This is so freakin’ cool! I just read about this on a blog about digital technologies in museums. It’s called “Pandora Radio,” part of the Music Genome Project. Just give them a song or an artist as a starting point (“seed”), and it will stream your own personal radio station to you, based on that starting point — music style, genre, instrumentation, etc. You can create your own mixes and send them to friends. You can rate each selection Pandora comes up with — much like Netflix — to help it refine its choices. I’ve heard two songs so far that I know, and two that I don’t. You can listen at home, on your mobile; hook into your Facebook account; watch videos about music.
Besides being very cool and fun, the interesting thing about Pandora is that it uses a filtering system built on the knowledge base of music experts. Unlike Netflix, where ratings are all provided by users, Pandora’s filters are created by people who know the intricacies of their subject area. Presumably this results in a higher-quality result, with selections based on clear criteria, rather than expressions of a popularity contest.
There’s definitely a place for both models in this new social networking world.
