A friend just turned me on to Pandora, a nifty free “music discovery service” that streams songs based on your preferences. How it works is you enter an artist as a starting point. If Pandora has the rights to them, your new “radio station” will play one of their songs. After that it tries to play songs by artists that have similar qualities based on the profiles in the Music Genome Project’s extensive database. For every track played, you can click on the album art and choose thumbs up, “I like it,” or thumbs down, “I don’t like it.” If you choose the latter the song cuts off and a new one starts. In this way Pandora tailors a play list to what you like. And it’ll probably be sooner rather than later that an aritst you’ve never heard of crops up.

It’s kind of funny because for any given track you can click on, “Why did you play this song?” and it will give you an explanation. For example, on Neu!’s “Negativland” it says, “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features electric rock instrumentation, electronica influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, and extended vamping.” Who knew?

I’ve seen that “extended vamping” comment quite a few times and admit I had no idea what it meant until I looked it up. The FAQ says,

‘Vamping’ is a term that refers to extended improvisation over a repeated chord change. One of the quintessetial examples of vamping is the outro to Freebird by Lynrd Skynrd, featuring a 5-minute epic guitar solo over some repeated chords.

So there I learned a new descriptive term. Maybe I’ll work it into a review sometime and make it sound like I know what I’m talking about.

Apparently Pandora is only supposed to be available to U.S. citizens because of licensing restrictions. You are required to enter a zip code when you sign up for an account. If you live in another country and want to try it, I don’t see what harm there’d be in saying that you live Georgia and your zip code is 30016…

If you do sign up, please leave your radio station address in the comments section or email it to us so we can check it out. If you’d like, you can give mine a listen too: X-Ray Dash Radio.