Today I was listening to podcasts and heard a two week old Inside the Net episode. The podcast was about the site pandora.com which is a high tech Internet Radio site. The company has developed some scientific methods for matching your musical tastes to music. Now their system is not just based on popularity contests like Amazon. These guys actually hire musicians to analyze the music and tag it in a technical sense.

How the site works is, you go to their site and pick a group or artist like U2. Then, based on the structure, style, vocal style, etc.., of the music U2 plays, they match you to similar groups. So you end up getting a stream of music that is taylored to your own personal tastes, in theory.

Now I was very excited about this because I am into New Age and Celtic music, stuff like Vangelis, Enya, Clannad, Loreena McKinnitt, and the Chieftains. It is tough to find music in these genres because most New Age music sucks, and there is not that much Celtic music to choose from. So I was pretty excited to try this out. Finally a service to guide me to new artists. Well things didn't work out quite as I had hoped.

I went to the site and setup a Vangelis station. That was a snap. So the music starts streaming and they start sending me some really heinous crap. So to help their system out, I try to identify my "favorite" songs so I can add them to the list of my favorites. So I tried to list tracks from what I would consider Vangelis' classic CDs like the Bladerunner Soundtrack, Themes which includes the opening title from "The Bounty", and some tracks from his 1492 soundtrack. Their system could not identify a single track or CD I owned. Talk about disappointing. And it wasn't just Vangelis. No luck with any of the Irish/Celtic soundtracks like Riverdance, Lord of the Dance, etc..

I was able to setup a Celtic New Age station because they do know who Enya, Clannad, Loreena McKinnitt and Secret Garden are. But even then I got some really weird songs streamed to me. Like a Madonna track (not that she doesn't have some good songs, but its not the same vibe as Clannad) and another from Heart?

So for now I guess I'm staying with live365.com and sky.fm and the like. Guess we will have to rely on the humans to DJ for a while longer.