I used to listen to a lot more music. In fact, my first website was music related (I won’t go into any more detail because it’s embarrassing). I guess I got a bad taste in my mouth from the shutdown of all of the file sharing websites. As new services have popped up that make it easy to listen to music for free, I’ve started to listen again. One of those services is Pandora, which uses The Music Genome Project to deliver users a radio station that is tailored to their individual tastes. It’s a simple idea, but a huge technical challenge. Not only does Oakland, CA based Pandora have to deliver different music to every user—and all at the same time—but they also have to be able to predict what kind of music you’re going to like based on songs that you tell them that you like. They do the hard part, and all you have to do is click a thumbs up or a thumbs down when they start playing a song for you.
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