i’ve always been a fan of listening to streaming radio over the internet. sometimes when you’re at work, you just don’t want to listen to the same mp3’s you’ve loaded on your corporate laptop over and over again. the daytime stations on the old radio are ‘o.k.’, but smooth jazz doesn’t exactly keep you awake. i used to be the biggest fan of launch radio from yahoo mainly because it tailored the music to your ratings.

but then i found pandora.

maybe i’m late to the game, but pandora is great! pandora labels itself as a product of the music genome project, described as the following:

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together 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.

what this means is that songs and artists are broken down in an almost scientific measure to allow listeners of a particular artist find and listen to music that is almost genetically the same.

here is how it works.

you create a simple account (they don’t barrage you with a lot of email, so a main email account is o.k.) and then type in a song or artist. a cool message appears and characterizes that song and creates a station based on that selection. the station then reads the ‘dna’ of the type of music and plays artists and music that are similar.

the best part, however, is that there are no commercials! to pay the bills, pandora simply has some ads that appear around the player.

an added bonus, as you create new stations, you’re old ones are saved! it’s cool to go back and forth between different genres in one sitting. the transitions are seamless and the quality is great. be sure to click the ‘i like it’ button when a song comes up (hover over the song) to let the project know they are on the right track.

if you couple this with my article about recording internet audio, you’ve got the next generation of online music listening!

[read: pandora.com]