Opening Pandora's Box

I have a new love in my life: Pandora.com. I might be incredibly late to this party, but I'm pretty sure it will not be ending any time soon.

Pandora is an online radio station that bases the tunes it plays on bands that you tell it you like. It's part of the Music Genome Project, which Pandora's founder Tim Westergren explains: "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 - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like."

It's awesome. You can have up to 100 radio stations geared for different favorite bands like Built to Spill, Radiohead, or the Pixies. My personal favorite is the amazing songs that are exposed through the Neutral Milk Hotel and Mountain Goats station. It's a great way to find new music and to remember old favs. Oh, and it's free.