Viva Pandora!

Ever wished for an Internet radio station that you can really tailor to your tastes? Now there's Pandora, and you can.

The Pandora player you see the first time you visit (the snap at right is from much later in my Pandora noodling career) asks you to name an artist or song you really like. I entered "Paul McCartney." The player responded by playing a song by Sir Paul (the recent Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard track "Riding to Vanity Fair"), and then began choosing other songs that, though they may typically be by other artists, have key characteristics in common (mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, subtle use of vocal harmony, major key tonality, and prominent percussion, for instance) with songs by Macca himself.

The second song in the Pandora-generated series, "Wherever You Are" by David Mead, was by an artist I'd never heard of, but one who (at least in that song) sounded almost like a Paul clone. I liked the sound, so I gave it a thumbs up in the Pandora player. That meant Pandora would henceforth bias my "Paul McCartney Radio" playlist toward Macca-like music that was also David Mead-like.

In fact, I liked "Wherever You Are" so much, I told the Pandora player to link to it ("buy" it, supposedly) in Apple's iTunes Music Store. This kind of activity causes the iTunes app to launch if it isn't already active, while Pandora continues to play. The appropriate search criteria are automatically passed from Pandora to the Music Store search engine, and the song you want (in possibly more than one version by the artist in question) appears in the iTunes results window. From there, I could click on "buy song" mext to one of these versions to have the song I'd told Pandora I liked and wanted put in my shopping cart, ready to purchase.

But, maddeningly, the Apple Store's music library is missing some key artists almost entirely — including McCartney, and also including the Beatles and Wings. If I try to buy a missing song, iTunes simply says "Your search did not return any results" and folds its hands complacently.

Actually, I ran into some additional snags the first time I tried to "buy" a song at iTunes courtesy of Pandora, and I had to resort to some clever computer-type strategies to get things working smoothly thenceforth. But the fact that this pass-off works at all (or can fairly easily be made to work) is a bit amazing.

But not as amazing as the fact that Pandora really does know how to pick music that matches, in this instance, my taste for Paul McCartney. Or, on another "station" I set up, this one for "Outlaw Country" stars Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson — the "Highwaymen" — plus, of course, their country cousin Merle Haggard. If I wanted, I could add Jerry Jeff Walker, and his "musical genome" would influence any subsequent selections Pandora makes on that particular station.

Yes, "musical genome" is the apt phrase — not "musical genre." What is a musical genome? Well, it's something defined by the Music Genome Project under the aegis of Tim Westergren, who is also Pandora's prime mover. According to this story in my local newspaper, the project broke popular music down into 400 parameters (one is, for instance, "use of vocal harmony") which could be used to describe any given song in the repertoire.

Every song in Pandora's 300,000-song library has been rated according to all 400 parameters by music theory-trained analysts whose correct judgments are absolutely crucial to the Pandora/Music Genome concept. As far as I can tell, the analysts are spot-on every time.

So far, I'm approximately six hours into my new Pandora lifestyle, and I've created five custom-tailored stations and found 19 songs to put in my Apple Music Store shopping cart. A few of the songs are ones I've heard before but never thought to buy. Most of them are brand new to me. Many or them are by artists I've never followed ... including four artists I've not heard of before!

So, yes, finally there's a way of setting up Internet radio stations to play music you're actually gonna like, even if it's brand new to you. Check it out!

P.S. By the way, Pandora is free! Supposedly, you have to look at ads ... but for whatever reason, I've yet to see an ad. If you want to make sure you never see an ad, you can pay Pandora $36 a year of use, or $12 for a shorter, three-month subscription.