Are you still listening to the same music that you did when you were a teenager or young adult? If you’ve bought the same Eagles album on 8-track tape, cassette tape, CD, and from iTunes, it's time to give some new music a try. This article is for you.
Are you still listening to the same music that you did back in the day? If you’ve bought the same album over and over again on various formats, then you need to look at a new form of audio media which may even help you embrace a whole new music genre. You’ve probably begun to suspect that there is new music out there that you’d like, if only you knew where to look to find it?
Radio is not the answer. Radio makes it a lot easier to find music that you don’t like.
Friends can help, but if you’re the only boomer in an office full of young squirts, it’s hard to get past the anonymity of the iPods, which stubborn you, you still don’t have.
The music industry, of course, is very happy that you’ve bought that Eagles album on every known recording media since it came out, but now that you’ve reassembled the music library of your youth, some new artists would really like you to give them a listen.
The websites are last.fm and pandora.com. They both offer free music streams. The difference between them is how they approach finding related music.
last.fm uses “collaborative filtering” to determine what music to suggest. The idea is that if you like so and so, you’ll also like this other so and so. Or if you like this so and so, other folks who also like that so and so like THIS other so and so, so you may too.
At last.fm, you can fill out a profile and tell them about your likes and dislikes, or you can simply name a group or artist and let the music start streaming. If you listen to a song to the end, the website figures that you liked the song and will offer something similar for the next song. If you skip the song, last.fm knows to try something else.
You can also download a program called the last.fm “Audioscrobbler.” It “scrobbles” around in your iTunes collection and the playlists of some other popular audio players and reports back to the mothership. The site then streams music that is similar to what it finds that you already have.
pandora.com uses a different, more human approach. In fact, it’s the front end of an ambitious project called the Music Genome Project®, which is described as “the most sophisticated taxonomy of musical information ever collected.” Pandora hires folks with music degrees to analyze the music. They look for up to 400 different distinct musical characteristics.
To start at Pandora, pick a music group or artist that you know that you like. Pick, say, the Eagles, and you get “The Eagles Radio.” After you’ve played several songs, it asks you to register with the website. At the bottom of the Pandora player, which runs in Adobe Air flash format, is a button that says “Guide Us.” It offers choices like “I really like this song” or “I want to add more kinds of music to this station.”
Interestingly, it also includes “Why is this song playing?” I just clicked that for a Moody Blues song (which I do like) and it says: “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features blues influences, a twelve-eight time signature, extensive vamping, a vocal-centric aesthetic, and minor key tonality.”
Wow.