I greatly enjoy listening to music while I work. iTunes is beginning to cost me a fortune. It appears I have little impulse control and often download several CDs within a couple of minutes on a whim. Evidently my spending habits are controlled by variables such as the cost of having to make a trip to the store or the effort required to pull out my credit card. Without these barriers I appear to be out of control.
My wife introduced me to an interesting online service that may feed this habit. Pandora is a service created by the Music Genome Project. It appears the concept is to “tag” a huge collection of songs with multiple descriptors. A Pandora user specifies a favorite “artist” or “song title” and Pandora first plays a song by that artist or version of that song and then offers a series of other songs with similar characteristics. I suppose the concept is to interest listeners in options that may expand the diversity of material that will be purchased (you can connect from Pandora to make purchases from other services). The cost is approximately $3 per month and you can listen to as much music as you want.
I find the tagging and exploration process intriguing (an XML application I think). I wonder what other set of resources could be explored in the same fashion. Maybe children’s literature – if you liked “Sleepy Time Bunny”, try “Train Coming.”
