Inside the Net with Amber McArther and Leo LaPorte interview Tim Westergren from the Music Genome Project and Pandora Media (MP3).
Over the past 5 years, Pandora has listened to 10,000 different songs - ranging from popular to obscure - and tagged them according to their musical qualities and characteristics. By using more than 100 descriptive tags, Pandora can match the style of music to your tastes.Pandora says they’re fundamentally different from Amazon and other shopping services which match your purchases with a list of similar top sellers. Pandora drills down to the DNA of each song. Pandora doesn’t care how popular a piece of music is.
You can create your own streaming radio station to fit your own taste. Pandora automatically programs it from your preferences. It takes your input (artists, songs) and feedback (”I like this”, “I don’t like this”) and creates stations that play songs that are musically similar to what you’ve told them.
Their music licenses do not allow them to play specific songs by request. Your song selection is used in rotation with lots of other similar music. You can create up to 100 streaming “stations” each with different themes and parameters.
Hundreds of radio channels are available on XM and Sirius, of course. But they require a special receiver and cost $12.95/month. Pandora is free (with ads) or $36/year (commercial free).Radio is a great unwired medium…and getting greater.
- iTunes, Rhapsody and Yahoo! Music Unlimited, among others, can create playlists on your computer or a portable music player.
- FIQL.com, Soundflavor.com, ArtOfTheMix.org, UpTo11.net, GoFish.com and WebJay.org are all community-minded music sites that feature searchable playlists and other sharing features. These sites typically include links to song samples and/or places to purchase or download the music.
- WebJay just got bought by Yahoo.
- Sirius offers over 125 channels of satellite radio with 68 devoted to commercial-free music, plus over 55 channels of sports, news and talk.
XM satellite radio features 160 digital channels with commercial-free music, over 30 channels of news, sports, talk and entertainment, and over 20 dedicated channels of XM Instant Traffic & Weather.- XM Radio Online streams over the internet and offers unlimited access to over 75 channels of the same programming you hear on XM Satellite Radio, plus 10 select AOL Radio channel. It uses RealPlayer to deliver for $7.95/month.
- X-StreamMobile is a PocketPC streaming player for XM satellite radio. Plug a couple of external speakers into the PocketPC headphone jack and you’re good to go. It may be a good reason to buy a $300 WiFi-enabled Dell PocketPC or $300 WiFi PocketPC from HP.
Acoustic Energy has a Wi-Fi Internet radio ($357 US) that claims to access over 99% of the internet radio stations broadcast on-line using a Wi-Fi connection. Any content from any radio station that is free on the internet is free to access on the Wi-Fi radio. It supports Real Audio, MP3 and Windows Media streams.- RadioTime is a program that runs on your PC and acts like a TiVo for radiostations. It adds one important component that most of its competitors are missing: a detailed schedule and the ability to work with an over-the-air radio tuner if you have one.
Because it’s Flash-based, Pandora can run on Windows, Mac and Linux. It allows you to create up to one hundred radio stations of your favorite music. They pay all ASCAP and BMI fees so you have a virtually unlimited selection of music. You can’t select an individual song or create an individual playlist, but Pandora allows you to refine your likes and dislikes over time. You can also purchase music that you like.
The advertising-supported version of Pandora is free, while 12 months of unlimited ad-free use costs $36.
Om Malik and Niall Kennedy interview David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, a 7-person hosted software shop in Chicago. Hansson developed Ruby on Rails.Street Easy is a mash-up of Google Maps that’s running Ruby on Rails showing New York realestate. HousingMaps.com is a similar arrangement, mapping housing on Craig’s List on top of Google Maps. TechCrunch, Web2.0 Show, Read/WriteWeb and Solution Watch link to The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005. The Mobilized Software Blog follows the field.
(Not really) related articles include; True Crime, Cities as Game Grids, Mobile WiMax Strategies, Xbox HQ, Cellular Movies, Flu Bug, Phones Get 3D Graphics and The Vision Project.
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