Pandora

I am a huge fan of Pandora.  I listen to it so much I had to upgrade my account because I had hit the free limit.  I'll admit, this is kind of sad; maybe I should give the whole conversation thing another try... but sometimes I can't help it, sometimes you get lost in the groove. 

One of the best articles I read in 2009 was this New York Times piece on Pandora.  It talks a lot about the history of the company and how they constructed the music algorithm but what I found most interesting, was the way Pandora calls attention to what defines people's musical preferences.

"Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it."

Check it out and let me know what you think.