Playing with Pandora

I’m sitting here listening to Pandora, the online music streaming service I talked about in my last post. Wolf Parade’s Shine a Light kicks things off. I am giddy as a little school person; waiting anxiously for the next track. Modest Mouse comes on. A bit predictable, but obviously related. This is followed by The Anniversary and then the Charmparticles, two bands I am unfamiliar with. I immediately question whether I know anything about music anymore until Morrissey begins to play.

I start a new station, and sticking with Montreal bands, I plug in Stars. Mae, Moxy Fruvous (yikes), and Junior Senior play in response, each with varying levels of similarity to Torquil Campbell and co. The Anniversary comes on again. Apparently they are the Kevin Bacon of both Wolf Parade and Stars.

Amazon and iTunes capitalized on the “customers who bought item A also purchased item B” mentality, and have reshaped the way consumers find books and music. Pandora is a more elaborate version of this idea. Services such as these underscore the fact that accessing content is no longer the problem. Sorting through it is. Why bother spending time looking for new music in clubs or record stores when complex algorithms and software calculations can just tell us what we should like?

Before I leave Pandora, I start a new station with The Anniversary. Bryan Adams comes on. So do the Killers, the Sounds, Lea Kruger and the Wallflowers. We can argue all day about how accurate Pandora’s predictions are or about the impact sites like these might have on the way we discover new music. Some of Pandora’s picks surprised me, in a good way, and led me to music I hadn’t heard before. Others scared me. My music’s DNA apparently links me to bands I never thought I could be linked to. It’s like when “scientists” tell us that our DNA links us to monkeys. Yeah, right.