Online Music recommendation engines

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 06:21:51 GMT

Although I'd heard about the Pandora music recommendation service before I'd never gone to try it out until tonight, and I found it amazing. I've been a longtime listener to Launch since before it was bought out by Yahoo, which is another similar service.

Both systems pretty much do the same thing... based on music that you tell the service you like, it chooses which songs to play next. In Launch you start your account by rating a bunch of genres and your favorite artists and songs, and it figures out what to play. You have specific control over the genres, artists, albums and songs that it plays. It's a great service.

The cool thing about Pandora, is that you simply type in an artist, and get started listening. Pandora tells you what's unique about the artist you specified, and then plays a song that's representative of the artist. For all my attempts it then proceeded to stream me songs that were remarkable similar to the artist I specifed, which means I really liked the music, but I'd never heard of the artists. I quickly flipped over to Yahoo's Launch and rated the songs to make sure I get exposure to those artists there. You can add artists to a Pandora station and rate songs thumbs up or thumbs down, but no fine tuning.

I highly recommend both services. Launch gives you the ability to rate all songs and genres in a single station, which works out pretty well, but sometimes gives me music that I'm not at all interested in. Pandora stays a bit more within a style, and I'm amazed at how well it works. MSN Radio has stations called "Counting Crows Fan Favorites," but they're only available to Plus subscribers and are rather dismal I must say. Telling Pandora to play a Counting Crows station produced much better results.

Both services are ad supported, but have a relatively low cost for what you get.

Investing Journal: Music

Online Music recommendation engines