How to find your new favorite band
The boom in digital music is sparking new interest in music recommendation services ?? essentially technology that analyzes what you like, and tries to find things you might not have heard based on that information.
Perhaps the most ambitious project was released to the public in a new form on Monday. Pandora, a streaming music subscription service based on technology called the Music Genome Project, creates "channels," similar to a radio station, based on a band or artists.
That's true of practically every music service, granted. Pandora's secret sauce is the Genome Project--a group of music experts that have listened to 300,000 individual songs and rated them on about 400 different "attributes." If you select a John Coltrane tune to base your station around, then you'll get songs by other artists that match his work in incredibly finely detailed ways.
Pandora is free to try for 10 hours, and works in Flash straight out of a Web page. It costs $3 a month to subscribe after that.
Another new service is called MusicStrands, which encourage people to build playlists, and then recommends artists you might like based on what often comes before and after a specific song in other people's playlists.
Neither of these is perfect, and the best bet, as always, is to find a friend whose taste you really trust, and has infinite time and money to explore new music. If you don't have that, it might be worth exploring one of these services.
