Cool Site For Discovering New Music
 

This site lets you enter a band that you like and then recommends other bands. Then you rate each song to narrow down the suggestions. Hard to explain, just try it. It's free but will nag you to register. Once you register it, you can use it to stream music to any computer. Link came from Fark.


Link:
http://www.pandora.com/

That's awesome, I'm gonna be obsessed with this for like a month.

Yeah, I'm pretty impressed.

Seems pretty cool, although Yahoo Radio or whatever it's called now does pretty much the same thing.

Bizarre... two threads about the same thing, both go exactly the same way: http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=97776

Huge thanks man. This site is really awesome.

www.last.fm now recommends stuff based on your mp3 playlist history as well.
you can never have too many recommendations, i guess.

Pretty cool. Thanks!

Awesome site. I already found a new band that I like within the first few songs that they played.

Yeah it's pretty awesome. But I found out about that like a couple of months ago. Back then they only limit it to 10 hours of free usage. I'm not sure if they still do that or not.

I just discovered this about 2 days ago. I like this because it creates a personal page for yourself that gives you stats about band you listen to most, what songs you listen to most, what albums, etc. Gives it to you in nice bar graph form, and I believe you can have those graphs show up on yoru blog, journal, or whathaveyou. Very cool.

yeah, see the audioscrobbler thread for more info...they kind of changed their name recently

WoW~
w o w
wow
WOW
Maybe it's because they don't let me out much anymore, but this is thee coolest thing that I've seen(or should I say-heard)in a while.
I'm turnin' all my 40- something year old friends on to Pandora as we speak.
just created a SRV/Hendrix station....ooooooooooowweeeeeeeeeeeee

This is awesome. I thought it was going to be like musicplasma, but this is even better. And I was trying to get some new music to listen to too, so this is perfect timing.


And I saw shadowfiend mention earlier about a time limit? Is that still the case? If so, is there any way around it other than paying for a subscription?

sounds cool.. gonna check it out.

sgn43 - they give you a brief trial and then require you to register, but you don't actually have to pay. All paying the subscription fee does is remove the ads, so far as I can tell.

In other news, this is the coolest thing I have ever seen. Seriously, I will let nobody go without hearing about this now.

I have yet to stump it, too. And I actually tried to do so.

I've managed to stump Pandora, and it wasn't that hard. To be honest, I'm not all that impressed with it. Its suggestions have been a bit 'meh' as far as I can tell... ironically, the best songs it throws out are by the band I originally put in... umm, yea, thanks.

Glad it's working for you guys though.

IMO, last.fm is way better, so far.

flamingdog - Who'd you stump it with? I went as obscure as I could think of without going to unsigned local bands(some of the E6) and it did okay with them.

As for the recommendations.. eh. I like the way it does it, picking out qualities of the songs and bringing up others that share those qualities. I reckon it's 'your mileage may vary' on that part.

I put in Karma to Burn, an instrumental stoner/sludge rock act I like. Was curious to see if it would bring up any other instrumental rock acts... ah... no. It had no idea who I was talking about.

It seems like a great idea, and I like the notion of taking individual musical elements and using those as a basis for new recommendations... It just hasn't worked out that well for me.

As you say, your mileage may vary.

i have been trying lesser known stuff as well, nothing local of course. recommendations have been fairly good when it can find one.

not found:
ticonderoga
syd dale
arling & cameron
paavoharju
axel stordahl
red snapper
evolution control committee
poj masta

found:
michel legrand
thavius beck
celestine
negativland
lanterna

Hmm, didnt work at all for me. Once I entered in an artist I really like, one of their songs popped up, and then if I ever hit "I like this, play more songs like this", nothing ever happened....oh well.

I think this thread is sticky-worthy. Just my opinion, though.

Great post. Thanks a ton!

I've been playing with this a bit recently. I also use Last.fm/audioscrobbler pretty heavily. I see the two as pretty seperate things--namely because Pandora actually plays music from the recommendations rather than just making a list.

But yeah, sometimes I don't always find the recommendations, from either site, that accurate--but then it's always easy to move on to the next song.

I've had better results with a combination of musicplasma and P2P. It's not instant gratification, but it's what works for me. I also used to look up bands I liked on artistdirect (what used to be or may well still be UBL.com) and check out what other bands they'd worked with, who was rated similarly, etc etc. That's how I found a few of my faves now.

Pandora is good stuff.
The thing about it is though, I remember reading in the faq there that you receive much better results when you insert an artist AND a song by that artist, rather than just the artist.
I went with just an artist at first [minus the bear] and it was so-so - giving me a wide variety of bands, but after I put in a song title and rated about 3 songs, it gave interpol [I'm a fan of them]. Strange, I never thought those 2 bands are that similar, but I guess their genome project works...

catcha back on the flipside,
keyshawn

Hey keyshawn, I started this thread because I was impressed by Pandora. But your mention of Interpol got my attention. Thanks a lot! So far, I like their tunes a lot. Any day that has me discovering a new group is a great day. Music radio can lick my balls.

There's that section on last.fm, if you just click on the radio, you put in a band and it'll play bands like it. It does a pretty good job, very similar.

I actually just noticed that. Last.fm has changed a lot recently...

The other big difference is that because last.fm is tabulated statistically, you're much more likely to have all of the "big" matches be large groups you already knew about, and either knew that you did or didn't like. I like that now you can get rid of suggestions, but once you get rid of the ones like that, you're often left with suggestions that are only barely related, not anything strange. So I guess you could say that Pandora is more likely to expose you to music you've never heard of, while last.fm is more likely to make accurate suggestions, whether or not you've already heard the group...