Pandora in Des Moines Sept. 27
Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, will be in Des Moines for a user's meeting on the evening of Thursday, September 27, 2007. If you like music, and if you're not familiar with Pandora or the Music Genome project, you should definitely check out:
Pandora.
It's a great way to hear new music that you're almost sure to love. You just tell it a song or artist you know you like and it will find other music that's similar. But it's much more complex than just picking other songs from the same genre. The people of the Music Genome project have analyzed thousands of songs to identify tons of features that can be used to compare them to other songs, so they aren't using anything as subjective as "genre". Then as it plays songs for you, you can give the song a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" and your preferences for that "station" will be further tuned. Just go try it out (it's free) and you'll get the idea.
They've had a tough year due to a bunch of stupid legislation regarding royalty fees for internet radio.
You should go meet Tim if you can. I'll post more when I learn where it will be (they're still deciding that).
Tim Fisher and I will also probably discuss this in an upcoming episode of our podcast, What's Up with Tech?.
