Pandora.com
Pandora.com, a free online radio site, bundles all the virtues of digitalized music into a beautifully designed interface. On Pandora Radio, a listener can enter an artist or song they like and Pandora will create a "radio station" that plays other, similar music. The creators of the site explain their interesting goal in the description of what they call the Music Genome Project, an effort to "capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song -- it's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records -- it's about what each individual song sounds like."
Users can guide Pandora by rating each song played, refining the radio station so it best represents their taste. The site is surprisingly intelligent: Users can even tell Pandora that they are "tired of a song," and it will stop playing that song for a month. The more the user interacts with Pandora, the more accurately it represents his or her musical identity.
Pandora Radio is slightly frightening in its ability to gauge personal preference using technology. The site's uncanny capacity for replicating musical taste has nearly reduced the sacred human relationship with music to a surprisingly accurate algorithm.
TheOdes.com
I have a fantasy that the creators of another great music web site, TheOdes.com, will take a cue from Pandora and make their site similarly user friendly. This web site has a different objective from Pandora: The Odes is building a community that unsigned artists can join for free to sell their music.
The site responds to profit-driven record labels by allowing artists to retain the rights to their songs, though they're sold through the site itself. Each song costs $1 to purchase and The Odes promises that between 50 and 70 percent of the money will go to the artist rather than the record label, which usually offers musical artists around 5 percent of each sale. Those who justify pirating music by the argument that their money is not reaching the artist anyway can rest assured that their money is going into the right hands when they buy through The Odes.
But the site is fairly young and lacks organization, which is its biggest problem. A user can search by genre or sample the best-selling songs, but individual songs, which may be gems, can easily get lost in the crowd. Conditioned to expect immediate gratification through mindless web surfing, most people won't be inclined to spend more than a few minutes searching for music they like.
If The Odes was organized like Pandora Radio, where the user could type in an artist or song that they like and find similar songs and artists, I think this web site would be a huge step forward for digital music. Mostly, though, I like the idea of repaying the artist directly for the music I enjoy.
These web sites represent some of the best aspects of the digitalization of music: They make it easier to appreciate and listen to a wide array of music. But these sites have significant -- even scary -- shortcomings, most importantly the dehumanization of musical taste. The personal is potentially no longer personal -- computers can calculate our artistic preferences, which can then be studied and made available to the public. My hope is that these sites will continue to make more music accessible to a greater number of people, without losing sight of what matters most -- the music itself.
