God, you've got to love obsessed people, especially when their preoccupations result in something as magically wonderful as Pandora Radio. It's an on line station where they pick a variety of music based on your tastes. And it's not just the typical or always what you'd expect, in fact they went about the research in a highly scientific way:
“we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song?we've carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day?quot;
That's dedication and I should shake the hands of Tim Westergren and his team for their work. The site introduces me to something new every day, like Spirogyra, Fever Tree and Paul Parrish (now I just have to get my hands on this rainbow colored album of his).
There are some limitations. You can only fast forward so many songs within a play list within an hour, and often times the site itself has has technical difficulties when I've tried to log on. I also stubbornly refuse to accept the truth that The Eagles are somewhat like my beloved Fleetwood Mac but I am not surprised to find that very little in this world is like Nick Cave as much as the man himself (by the way have you gotten your tickets for his Oct 4th show??).
Seriously take some time enjoying getting your horizons broadened by this site. Plus, it works at offices that don't allow streaming media, so use it liberally at work to drown out any body else's ipod that you may not want to hear. Pandora Radio makes me wish I had nothing but idle computer time on my hands.
But what do you think?