This is an interesting musical diversion I found via Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine. It's called the Pandora Music Genome Project. On the surface, it's a simple online jukebox, that plays an assortment of music for you. On closer look, it's much cooler than that. You enter the name of a particular song or artist, and Pandora combs its "music genome" database to come up with other songs that exhibit similar key traits. The results can be quite entertaining... and occasionally wildly inaccurate. Fortunately, you can guide the playlist toward more of a particular style, or warn it off of paths you care not to tread down.
Naturally, the first two "Stations" I set up were based around the Kinks and Billy Joel. The results were somewhat predictable, although more Who songs turned up on the Joel Station than the Kinks, which I found perplexing, since I've always found the Kinks and the Who to be very similar as far as British Invasion groups go.
Then, suddenly, inspiration struck. Why content myself to music I already had loaded on my computer or readily available on CD? Let's put Pandora to the test! So I went a little nuts, going for obscure or offbeat, in some cases entering artists I was barely familiar with. So now I have Stations built around Hawkwind, the Mike Curb Congregation and William Shatner & Leonard Nimoy. Wow. Right now I've got a Hoyt Axton station playing. Some of the artists gravitate toward country as you'd expect, such as the Bellamy Brothers and Restless Heart, but songs by the Minutemen and Pluto have cropped up. Fascinating.
Now Playing: Pandora Hoyt Axton radio
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