Milne Arts

One of my favorite areas of Web 2.0 that has been expanding in leaps and bounds is that of music. Pandora is the one that I have used for the past 2 years. I begin by entering a song that I am fond of and it creates a “station” based upon the criteria that describe the song. From their website:

“Since we started back in 2000, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” 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.

So if I start a station on the song “Rio” by Duran Duran, the app looks through its database for other songs that are similar. Some suggestions that come up are songs by Erasure and Prince. As each song plays, there is the option to approve or toss it out. The app tracks the differences in criteria and so you end up getting exactly the kind of music that you want. In my case, I’m building a collection of 80’s music, but I could change it so that it specifically looks for New Romantic tunes only.

Pandora isn’t the only gig out there. Here at Mashable, they’ve compiled a list of 50 Music Discovery sites!