Pandora

I spent some time catching up on podcasts yesterday. I was listening to a podcast on Inside the Net. They were talking to the creator of Pandora. Pandora is a music streaming service that is based on the Music Genome Project (a project that has defined ~400 classifications for music). Songs are classified and stored in a database. The Pandora application (a flash application available in the browser) prompts you to enter a song or artist that you like. It then scours the database to build a playlist that matches music like the song or artist that you specified. The user interface is quite simple, you start with the search field. It creates the playlist and starts playing the song/artist you selected. It displays the album art for that title. By clicking on the album art, you get options for buying the song or album, giving it a "thumbs up or down", and adding to favorites. You can create multiple search queries which create multiple "radio stations" that will be saved for you to access later. The music database is farily large (100's of thousands). The best thing about this service... It's FREE! If you like music, I highly recommend trying this service!