Data Mining, Down Under

You may have listened to Internet radio before, but Pandora is a station of a different kind – totally personalised. Its a Flash based player that sits inside your browser, so no problems with firewalls. But the real innovation is that when you start it up, you tell it the artists you like, and it will attempt to determine what other songs you will like too, and play those to your personal audio stream. As time progresses you can give each song played the thumbs-up or thumbs-down which will further refine what music is played to you!! Its not bad, but they should some more advanced techniques like MusicMiner to better adapt to user tastes.

MusicMiner uses a Self-Organising Maps based technique (“Emergent SOM“) to determine and visualise music similarity:

The major advantage of MusicMiner is obviously you can use it on your own music collection and choose to play a particular song, whereas Pandora you can only define your interests and listen to see what is played. There is no guarantee Pandora will actually play that artist although usually it will eventually.