My friend has been asking me for a good streaming music site. She didn't like my suggestion of Live365.com, so I found a great site called Pandora. It's a music recommendation service in the form of a streaming radio station. You simply enter the name of a song or artist and the service puts together a playlist with songs that have similar music qualities like rhythm, arrangement, lyrics, tone, etc. You can even rate songs and add other songs, adapting the station to your taste.
This is part of the Music Genome Project an effort to "'capture the essence of music at the fundamental level' by using over 400 attributes to describe songs." Other services like MusicBrainz attempt to categorize and organize music. Tunatic is a wonderful program that actually listens to music through your computer microphone and identifies the song.
Our sense of music is really changing. It's not just about genre anymore. It's about the deep song traits that define what music really is.
