Pandora - Music Discovery Service

I've recently been working on a digital music project at MERL and happened to run across a link to this company/service on Jeff Jarvis's Buzznet. This is great stuff! Originally used for in-store music recommendations (you know the headphones you can use to listed to music at BestBuy) this recommendation technology is now available on the web to consumers from the Music Genome Project (a.k.a. Savage Beast Technologies) a venture-funded startup in Oakland, CA.

Pandora has a great initial hook. Using a nice Flash interface you enter an artist/song you like and the service comes back with a streaming "station" of songs that are similar to the artist/song you liked. As you listen to the stream of songs you can give them a thumbs up or down which should help in subsequent recommendations. You get your first 10 hours free (of which I am burning through quickly as we speak) then you are asked to pay a subscription of $36/yr.

If you like one of the songs you are hearing, Pandora makes it easy for you to buy the CD from Amazon or get the song from iTunes. I think Apple should scoop these guys ASAP to lock up this technology for iTunes. Right now iTunes is a great way to purchase music but it could use a lot of help on the "discovery" front.

Warning, if you think you are already spending too much money in downloading music then do not try Pandora!