Pandora goes public

no, not really public like NASDAQ... but they did recently sign a deal with MSN to provide MSN Radio. looks like someone at microsoft actually has a brain in their head.

Pandora plays streaming music via a flash player in your browser and is powered by the Music Genome Project. honestly, the MGP is one of those ideas that you slap yourself in the head and think, "i've always thought about that, why couldn't i think of a way to do this?!?"

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.

Pandora and the MGP are an exciting piece of the social music revolution that's happening thanks to digital/online music. i can discover music based on criteria i already know i enjoy; share playlists, artists, etc.; track it all with last.fm (see the awesome pandora/last.fm mashup, PandoraFM); then head to eMusic and download my favorites. if you don't have an eMusic account, you're missing out on one of the best online music sites, IMHO. they don't have the catalog of iTunes or Rhapsody, but if you're a music fan with eclectic taste, you won't be disappointed.

read more about Pandora at TechCrunch. if it's good enough for mike arrington, it's good enough for me. ;)