Pandora
I’ve been meaning to post something about this for a while. .Pandora. One of those stupendously amazing things that would have, I’m sure, seemed totally miraculous a few years ago, prior to the internet and broadband connections. If you haven’t already tried it give it a go – I think it has more than novelty value. It’s free, but you’ll need to make up a US zip code if you decide to stick with it (I’m confidant you will). What it does is create a personalised playlist or ‘radio station’ based on the name of a band or artist you specify. It references a massive on line music database ‘the music genome project’, and chooses other music you might like based on similarity of form. I think it does so in quite a technical basis and it’s not flawless, but it’s really brilliant if you want to here something new, or find the shuffle setting on your mp3 player a bit too random. You can have lots of channels of your favourite artists running simultaneously, and then flick between them and rate the choices it suggests in order help refine a channel. The ambition of this program is potentially limitless and I just think it’ amazing that it works at all.
It’s another step towards a time when there will be no such thing as scheduled broadcast media. What we will see increasingly is personalised content; it’s already upon us to some degree in various forms.