in

• Issue 1
• Politics and Society

I was listening to Jimi Hendrix, followed by The Who, Bob Dylan and other living and dead music legends when Puff Daddy came on singing a Sting song.  The problem here (besides the obvious one of Puff Daddy and Sting) is that I was controlling the play list - or at least I thought I was.  I scrambled back to the website and hit skip. On to Pink Floyd.

This happened during one of my first visits to Last.fm, an interactive streaming music website.  Along with Pandora, Last.fm is arguably the best-known website which tailors music to your taste.

They both work by asking you to enter an artist or group you want to listen to and then feeding you a playlist that should be music to your ears.  Like your music-geek friends, they come up with an exhaustive list - except where music nerds recommend songs on the basis of a lifetime of listening, these sites do it through a mix of algorithms, music analysis and social networking.

Musicologists created Pandora (www.pandora.com) as part of the Music Genome Project.  After identifying all the components to a song (tone, melody, sparse use of instruments, etc.) they apply scientific fomulas to match songs similar to your requests, building you a 'radio station' in the process. 

The biological approach to categorising music generally seems to work, and it can even make you surprisingly more intelligent about music.  For example, I learned that Cornelius, a Japanese music producer, is a vocal centric artist and his songs show major key tonality changes. Impressed?

One element to the scientific approach central to Pandora's selective process is the assumption that all things being equal, songs with matching 'genetics' should impress you to the same extent.  However, the world of human tastes is fickle - I share my genetic traits with my family, too, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I like all my cousins. Similarly, Pandora can fall victim to a the same sort of genetic flukes.

That said, Pandora is extremely user friendly and allows you to assign approval and disapproval to each song to help refine its matching capabilities.  The interfaces are uber-friendly in that idiosyncratically American way that seems almost superficial - when I tagged a song that I liked, up popped the message 'Cool, we're glad you like it!'

I moved on from Pandora when they were unable to retrieve the seminal Irish song 'Where's Me Jumper?'.

'Did you want "Where's the Boy for Me?" by the Revillos?'

No thanks.

Last.fm (www.last.fm) immediately found Cork-based band The Sultans of Ping, a 'nut-job punkish' group. Music is always that bit more special when it's from your backyard, and it's good. I wanted to listen to 'Where's me Jumper?' for the brilliant opening lines that come off the back of a drum roll: 'My brother, he knows Karl Marx / He met him eating mushrooms in the Peoples' Park.'

Sadly, Last.fm didn't have the song either, but they at least had the group tagged as 'indie/punk/pop'.  Like Pandora, it also compiles a personal playlist (and even provided me with a radio station that a previous user had created).  Unlike Pandora, however, it bases its suggestions on what other listeners have suggested. 

Additionally, Last.fm uses 'scrobbler' software to track the music playing on your computer, which allows them to notice trends and eventually wipe out any anomalies in in users' play lists (Puff Daddy, in my case).

As with Web 2.0 sites, social networking and interactivity is the key to success.  Users can create profiles, find listeners with similar musical tastes and make friends with complete strangers on the basis of compatible music palettes.

Many interactive music sites have also entered deals with record labels to provide better access to their artists.  Last.fm has signed contracts with EMI and Warner Brothers; Slacker (www.slacker.com), which launched earlier this year, has agreements with both major and independent labels.

With time spent online increasing each year, web radio will continue to grow.  Last year, a Google survey revealed that Britons spend more time on the internet than watching television - Londoners and Scottish surfers topped the list.

But not to worry, services like Pandora probably won't create an army of music geeks since listeners aren't actively monitoring their playlists.  Still, they occasionally throw up songs which trigger memories - like when The Blood Hound Gang were at their peak with 'The Bad Touch' and teenagers were driving around with the windows down shouting out 'You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals / So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel'.

 

Image: Flickr