Pandora for the holidays

One of the most interesting (and useful) sites to come along in 2005 is Pandora. Using the power of the Music Genome Project, the program slices and dices songs into their essential components, and makes surprisingly accurate guesses about what else a user would like, based on what song or artist was entered. You may not think of Hanson‘s music when you’re a Todd Rundgren fan, like Peter is, but it turns out they have a song very similar to some of his work.

What’s especially interesting this time of year is that you can get any sort of holiday music out of Pandora that you’d like. I entered “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” by Harry Connick Jr., and discovered a Louis Armstrong holiday song (“Christmas Night in Harlem”) that I’d never heard of before, and currently have jazzy Christmas music streaming across my work computer.

And if the ads on Pandora didn’t give it away, you can buy any of the songs you hear through iTunes. In other words, Pandora is just a really, really smart (and portable, if you register with the site so you can pull up the stations you create from any Internet connection) record store listening station.

Neat.

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