The Music Genome Project

Say--like me--that you like laid-back funk-, soul-, and jazz-inspired electronic groove music with smooth vocals and layered rhythm arrangements. Something like, oh I don't know, Release 1.0 by Doctor Jazz's Universal Remedy. Or perhaps The Brand New Heavies' All About the Funk. Well and good, but how can I find other music that's similar to the music I already know I like? While one answer would be to ask advice of someone who knows a lot about music (hat tip to AM for this link), there's also the web 2.0 answer. Enter the Music Genome Project:

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.

Based upon this work, the project leaders have set up the site, Pandora. Enter the name of an artist, or even a single song title, and listen to a stream of titles which have a similar genetic constitution, musically speaking. Check it out. The worldwide web and the whole wide world have in common--apart from boasting the initials WWW--at least the fact that they contain a lot worth discovering.

Oh, and I think I should mention how I happened upon Pandora. I'm trying out StumbleUpon, which lets internauts become daring explorers, silent observers, or both. Official glossy-pamphlet literature:

What is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click [the Stumble! icon], we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 1,902,465 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.

How Does it Work?
StumbleUpon uses [up/down] ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn't find using a search engine.

Good travels!