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iTunes Algorithms and Pandora

Posted August 30th, 2005 @ 11:47am by Erik J. Barzeski

As I was reading "How Much Does iTunes Like My Five-Star Songs?" Jeff IMed to tell me about Pandora.com, which is essentially an Internet radio station that asks you for your favorite song or artist, then plays more music that's similar in style.

Pandora gives you ten hours for free, then looks to charge $36/year. Two things could make this service a little better:

  1. Let me play and manage my stations from within iTunes.
  2. Let me get lists of songs that are similar to my favorites so that I can purchase the darn music. I'd use a separate $12/year offer that didn't stream music but simply offered this information.

As it stands now, I doubt I'll listen beyond the 10 hours. I'll just skip the R.E.M. songs that come up and write down the others that I like.

3 Comments »

3 Responses to "iTunes Algorithms and Pandora"

  1. | Reply Scott
    Posted 30 Aug 2005 at 12:30pm #

    What others does it say for R.E.M.?

  2. | Reply Clint Ecker
    Posted 30 Aug 2005 at 9:08pm #

    Check out Audioscrobbler/Last.fm. You just use the iScrobbler plugin and it sends your listening history to their servers and keeps a profile on you. It can recommend new music and give you stats on your listening habits.

    If you subscribe to the services (which is whatever you feel is a good price for a service). That is, there is no set price, you pay a one time fee of whatever, or a monthly fee of whatever you like.

    Once you begin paying, you have access to Last.FM which is a streaming radio service that's influenced by your Audioscrobbler profile, which is powered by your own listening habits.

    I know you don't encounter this situation, but I like feeding the profile while I'm at home, and listening to my Last.FM stream at work. It seems to play a lot of what you already like while inserting stuff it thinks you might like.

    AS is very cool because they're pretty open and make all of their data freely available (with private data stripped, obviously) and put up weekly "charts" of what albums, tracks, and artists are hot. It's also got the standard social networking/tagging features, if you're into that.

    Enough babbling, but it sounds like you might be interested 😉

    http://www.last.fm/ for the main page and http://www.last.fm/charts/ for the charts.

  3. | Reply lausse
    Posted 08 Jun 2007 at 4:44am #

    I would like a plug for itunes that can use the same alorithms for all my local music. Especially now when we can not use Pandora anymore - here in Europe.