More on Pandora

Here's an East Bay Express article about Pandora, the Internet radio site I covered in Viva Pandora!. I'm still grooving on the sheer abundance of good music it will serve up to you, if you tell it a favorite artist or song title. I now have 34 songs stacked up in my Apple Music Store shopping cart, and I'm not even trying real hard to snag every hot lick and tuneful tour de force I hear.

Pandora ranks the over 300,000 songs in its library according to hundreds of musical "genes" identified by the Music Genome Project as constituting the best way to analyze song tracks for perhaps surprising similarities. For example, according to the article, "whether the kick drum sound is tight or booming" is one of 235 genes identified for the hip-hop/electronic genre. However, the jazz genre's "gene that counts improvised sax licks" is, obviously, not, though it is one of the total of 400 or so genes spread across those two genres and also those of rock/pop/country and world music.

I find it fascinating — and here's something you won't glean from the Pandora FAQ — that Pandora constructs a stream made up of tight, mood-similar sets. It

... builds a series of short playlists around common elements, much the way a real-life deejay puts music together into sets, first establishing one mood, then breaking it for another one ... [T]he site plays a set tightly connected to the original request in some way, then moves on to another set that's related a different way.

If I had my way, I'd ask that Pandora provide a way to quickly skip ahead not only to the next song but to the next set ... i.e., to take me to the next mood.