Pretty cool personalized web 'radio station'

[philbo]

I read about this in a studio magazine (sorry, I don't recall which one, I get a pile of them every month). Anyway, it's a giant music database that does an 'eHarmony' sort of analysis of each song, and on each artists style using 400 or so attributes. It has about 500K songs, including all the Billboard top 200 going back several decades, along with an unknown number of 'wow, that's great stuff-who the hell are they' type artists.

 

This is not a download site, it is streaming audio (decent quality MP3), perfect for listening while working on non-audio stuff on a PC.

 

The web site is pandora.comThe deal is, you sign up with a junk email address, then enter in any songs or artists you can think of, and it'll play that plus other tunes and artists that are musically similar.

 

I like it because it pulls up music I love, done by people I've never heard of, or by artists I knew of but never heard that song, along with the already familiar artists & their tunes.

 

The benefit: You find new artists & music you really dig. There are links to artist & album info, and to where you can buy it if you want your own copy.

 

In case anybody's interested in my musical tastes, here's a link to my station:

Philbos Phavorite Tunage

 

I look forward to seeing similar links from forum members who try it out and want to share their tastes.

 

Merry Christmas to my forum friends!

 

Philbo

Tangent Studio

[John Sayers]

I had an account with them last year but they've now restricted their access to the US only.

[philbo]

I had an account with them last year but they've now restricted their access to the US only.

 

Well, that sucks!! I suppose the royalty quagmire made the economics unmanageable? Who knows? But it's too bad.

[Kerouac]

 

I've been using that for a year or two now. Great site, and I send it to all of my guitar and bass students for them to find cool new artists. My dad loves it too.

[UstadKhanAli]

I like that site. I've been using it on and off for a couple of years now.

[rasputin1963]

Wow. Pretty kewl. They've got me pretty much nailed.

[UstadKhanAli]

I confuse the hell out of them, but regardless, they still come up with interesting choices that I like hearing.

[Fendercaster]

Thanks for the link, I'd never heard of Pandora. Set up an account, got the Hellecasters blasting now, watching the game!

[blue2blue]

It's a pretty neat resource. I tend to prefer picking my own stuff on my subscription service but Pandora has wider reaching tentacles. The fi isn't too hi but what do you want for free?

 

It seems like, if you listen to a station long enough it sort of spins out of its groove.

 

I experimented with both lose definitions (a single song or artist) and tight (a number of artists in a relatively tight genre cluster) as well as eclectic and I've actually had the best luck with a single song or artist.

 

One of the very best stations I've 'created' was based simply on "Lush Life" by Coltrane with Johnny Hartman. Another station based strictly around the British art-blues-rock band Family proved pretty fertile -- though it would always kind of spin out into quirky new wave late 70s/early 80s sounding stuff from the last few decades...

[daklander]

I've also been on Pandora for a couple of years. You might have a look at slacker.com and accuradio.com as well.

[Kerouac]

 

It's a pretty neat resource. I tend to prefer picking my own stuff on my subscription service but Pandora has wider reaching tentacles. The fi isn't too hi but what do you want for free? It seems like, if you listen to a station long enough it sort of spins out of its groove. I experimented with both lose definitions (a single song or artist) and tight (a number of artists in a relatively tight genre cluster) as well as eclectic and I've actually had the best luck with a single song or artist. One of the very best stations I've 'created' was based simply on "Lush Life" by Coltrane with Johnny Hartman. Another station based strictly around the British art-blues-rock band Family proved pretty fertile -- though it would always kind of spin out into quirky new wave late 70s/early 80s sounding stuff from the last few decades...

 

 

I've found a lot of bands on there that I later purchased their albums... mainly in the industrial or the punk(ish) genres, but a lot of folk and acoustic artists as well. To me it's the logical evolution of my teenage years where I used to pour through Century Media and Nuclear Blast catalogs looking for artists who were similar to bands I already liked.

[Magpel]

My only problem with Pandora is that I just don;t listen to a lot of music at my computer.

[rasputin1963]

I'm lovin' the two or three stations I've created.

 

But it just dawned on me: Is the name of the service the best one they could've chosen?

 

In mythology, "Pandora's box" was a box which the insatiably curious young woman was forbidden to open, because, once opened, it gave mankind all the woes, ills, diseases and pains of the world.

 

Maybe Pandora typed in "Kenny G."

[Synonym Music]

It is interesting, but they don't have Elliot Goldenthal nailed worth a damn. It's basing all the search parameters off his work he did on Frida (yeah it won him a grammy, whoop dee doo) and really that's uncharacteristic of his compositional style: Straussian, atonal, ambient, and quite orchestrated. There's lots of Aaron Copland and Corigliano in there for sure... Which is certainly not close to the music I'm hearing now, which includes tons of classical guitar, pieces INCREDIBLY far away from what he does. I kept thumbs-downing everything, but it kept the guitar music lilting away. God damn it's annoying.

 

Anyway..... Nice find nonetheless. I've heard and used it about 3 times over the past 2 years. It's precisely because of this vague searching that I forgot about it.

 

 

 

 

With one excepted stumble-upon: "Galaxies" by Laura Veirs.

[rasputin1963]

It is interesting, but they don't have Elliot Goldenthal nailed worth a damn. It's basing all the search parameters off his work he did on Frida (yeah it won him a grammy, whoop dee doo) and really that's uncharacteristic of his compositional style: Straussian, atonal, ambient, and quite orchestrated. There's lots of Aaron Copland and Corigliano in there for sure... Which is certainly not close to the music I'm hearing now, which includes tons of classical guitar, pieces INCREDIBLY far away from what he does. I kept thumbs-downing everything, but it kept the guitar music lilting away. God damn.... etc.

 

 

I notice PANDORA makes some judgment calls based on about 6 or 7 criteria it deems to be important.

 

[e.g. It seems to associate "Dionne Warwick" with "electric pianos" and "major keys".... not so accurate, if ya ask me, but...]

 

PANDORA cannot know all the reasons why we like a particular artist. Especially for us here on this Forum: there might be a number of intellectual (or historical) reasons why we like a particular artist. I'm sure PANDORA doesn't want to be un-PC... but what if we want to hear a steady stream of only Black artistes (as I did, unashamedly, yesterday)?

 

....and I suppose there could conceivably be visual, non-auditory reasons. The guy who types in "Britney Spears" may be looking for "primarily blonde artists with big tits".

 

Is PANDORA aiming towards a quasi-artificial intelligence? In other words, is the database "learning" and refining itself all the time from our ratings?

[blue2blue]

It is interesting, but they don't have Elliot Goldenthal nailed worth a damn. It's basing all the search parameters off his work he did on Frida (yeah it won him a grammy, whoop dee doo) and really that's uncharacteristic of his compositional style: Straussian, atonal, ambient, and quite orchestrated. There's lots of Aaron Copland and Corigliano in there for sure... Which is certainly not close to the music I'm hearing now, which includes tons of classical guitar, pieces INCREDIBLY far away from what he does. I kept thumbs-downing everything, but it kept the guitar music lilting away. God damn it's annoying. Anyway..... Nice find nonetheless. I've heard and used it about 3 times over the past 2 years. It's precisely because of this vague searching that I forgot about it. With one excepted stumble-upon: "Galaxies" by Laura Veirs.

Try putting in a specific song or songs -- although that may be unproductive with obscure songs -- I just put in a handful of Ravi Shankar (not exactly an unknown) titles and nada....

 

(Putting in Ravi himself was [see update this para] more productive, of course, but, IIRC, when I did some time ago I got a number of east-west fusion projects -- not unsurprisingly, since Ravi himself toiled in that vein at some length. But, I gotta tell ya -- there really was only one Ravi Shankar and no one I've heard comes close in fluidity and seemingly effortless grace on his instrument. UPDATE: when I tried putting in Ravi Shankar just now -- it couldn't find him, only providing his nephew and neice [who are no match for the master]. I tried a station based around Ananda Shankar [i actually own his first LP from the 70s] and it was, for me, unlistenable. AS's fervid, multi-culti jumble was somewhat expected, but the other artists were a hideous morass of either bad sitar or bad sitar samples and robo-tabla.)

 

 

Pandora's not about finding specifics, of course, but suggesting new associations and parallels.

 

(And that said, I found that when I put in Modest Mouse as the starting point, about the only thing in the list that fired me up was... Modest Mouse. But then, strange as it may seem, it looks like there's only one Modest Mouse, too. )

 

 

Everytime I try to spend much time with Pandora, though, I come away liking my $6/mo on demand subscription that much better. The fi is so much higher and being able to pick the songs and artists you want to hear is, for me, of paramount importance.

[Synonym Music]

I don't know where it derives its intelligence though. I mean..... When you put in a composer who's done a good ten or fifteen soundtracks before the year of his most famous work, that's probably what's going to define his style the best. Not only was Frida his most divergent work, it was generally his weakest if you ask me. He didn't win for past soundtracks - most of which were featured in movies many people didn't watch - saw his chance to go for the gold, and did so.

 

It's like the Grammies have a requirement that the artist or composer in question be nominated for either the best OR worst work they've ever done and will ever do. You can't have any middle-of-the-road nominations.

 

So....

 

Interview with the Vampire...

 

Alien 3....

 

Heat....

 

A Time to Kill.....

 

Batman Forever...

 

and Sphere....

 

 

 

And it gives me classical guitar.

 

I hear you on the song titles Blue but it's rather difficult when the names are "Adagio," "Lento," "Code Red," "Music for Dialogues," "Tocatta and Dreamscapes," "Agnus Dei," etc. There's a great deal of religiosity in his composition, but it's not exactly light and fluffy.

 

I'll try again though. It's not like you complain when you have free music thrown at your feet.

[Synonym Music]

Ahhhhhhh....... You know what the problem was? Frida is the only soundtrack by him that Pandora has in its archives. You were right, Blue.

 

 

Not that I don't see this as a major flaw since I'm not asking for particularly obscure material, but meh.

[rasputin1963]

Then again, sometimes PANDORA gets it right:

 

I typed in "Stylistics" and they play plenty of choice, classic mid-70's orchestrated soul, by the likes of the Spinners, Chi-Lites, Al Williams, Delfonics, Outsiders, Hall & Oates, etc.

[blue2blue]

 

Ahhhhhhh....... You know what the problem was? Frida is the only soundtrack by him that Pandora has in its archives. You were right, Blue. Not that I don't see this as a major flaw since I'm not asking for particularly obscure material, but meh.

 

Well -- it's designed specifically to not be an on-demand service, which would, if I understand correctly, change it's royalty fee payment structure.

 

Speaking of on-demand, doing a search (on Yahoo Music which I subscribe to) just on Goldenthal's name I found the soundtrack for Final Fantasy -- but that was all. I checked the others by title and found most of them -- but they were all unavailable (I noticed at least some of them were compilations other artists which can present licensing issues on subscription services, apparently).

[Zeromus-X]

I'm still wishing you could narrow down your preferences. For example, I can put in a string of artists or songs, and it'll tell me why it picked the next songs... but I wish I could choose from those attributes themselves.

[rasputin1963]

Sometimes, I've noticed, PANDORA can't play the artist you suggest/desire, even though the artiste is a big name: I think they can only pick their artistes from the SESAC pool...

[Synonym Music]

Well -- it's designed specifically to not be an on-demand service, which would, if I understand correctly, change it's royalty fee payment structure.

 

Yeah, and some are out of print to say the least... That's why the Alien 3 soundtrack put me back a whopping 46 dollars, but quite honestly it's worth that (er, well, for something that was so hard to find and so high in quality).

...Sheesh, I'm actually willing to pay good money for music I like. Who woulda thunk it???...

 

Anyway I'm just saying Pandora's repertoire seemed limited in this case. I wasn't really looking for his music - I already have that, remember - but I was looking for something similar to it. Based on one album, classical guitar fits, but that's one album. I also thumbs-downed every single song that came up - including the one from Frida! - and it kept giving me the same thing over and over for six songs straight. I could hardly tell the difference from piece to pieces because they were all so similar.

 

That's not very good variety in this instance. I'm hoping they can expand the service and offer broader choices. One thing to remember is that Goldenthal writes quite a large amount of material on the works he creates, usually only citing one orchestrator along with himself as composer and lead orchestrator. That's two people working on all the instrument sections for all selections within the film, which is a bit steep to say the least.

 

Additionally, when you work on such maligned box office failures like A3 and The Spirits Within (cost: 110 million; gross: 90 million worldwide!), people don't really come searching for your work as much as you'd like. He's not the Star Wars composer or the Gladiator composer or the Pirates of the Caribbean composer - not that I give two rusty damns about that - and so, despite a sometimes superior compositional ability, his works get overlooked.

 

Vagues names hurt too. Sphere in this instance is the 1997 film adaptation of the '86 Crichton book; nobody saw that either.

 

Heat, by Michael Mann.

 

Interview with the Vampire; '94 film adaptation of the '76 book.

 

A Time to kill; '96 adaptation of the Grisham novel.

 

Adagio and lento are simply musical markings and don't particularly describe the piece well. They're both slow, yes.... And......? You don't know unless you listen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*looks at posts*

 

Sorry to go on a tirade.