Pandora is a neat site run the people who set up the Music Genome Project. For those that haven’t heard of this great idea, it captures the essence of music at the most fundamental level. Here is their spiel:

Hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” have been assembled into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like. Over the past 5 years, they carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time.

Based on a simple starting point, say “Jeff likes Led Zeppelin,” Pandora serves up songs for your listening pleasure based on the genes that most closely identify with the chosen artist. For instance, “Cemetary Gates” by Pantera, one of my all-time favorite late 90s 104.3 FM songs, was played because it featured hard rock roots, mild rhythmic syncopation, minor key tonality, acoustic rhythm guitars and many other similarities identified in the music genome project. Based on user feedback (thumbs up, thumbs down), it further refines its suggestions until you are getting a steady diet of classics, recent classics and brand new songs and/or artists that you’ve never heard of that are just simply awesome.
I need some time to see how large the music database is because already I’ve heard some songs for the second time and I haven’t been listening that long. However, right now I think its a much better version of Launch.com, which I stopped using after it was bought by Yahoo! because somehow my profile was deleted after the move. After weeks of saying “yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no, etc” all of my effort was lost. For shame!
Via Jessie