PANDORA: GO ON, OPEN IT

HickoryWind.org buddy Carlton has been my friend for many years, and he knows my, um, problem with CD addiction quite well. And dammit, he doesn't care.

If he did care -- if he wanted me to have enough money to eat food and have nice things and take some nifty vacations -- he would never, never have introduced me to Pandora.com.

Pandora is basically a streaming Internet radio doohickey (that's a technical term, folks), but much like Carlton, it is evil. Deliciously evil. Why? Because it's basically a Internet radio doohickey that uses science (I know, eeew) to help you find songs you like. On CDs you will want to buy. Like I didn't have a long enough list of those already ... sigh.

Pandora is brought to you by the fine geeks folks who for six years or so have been working on the Music Genome Project, a massive undertaking to analyze music of all kinds. They explain it like this:

Together our team of thirty musician-analysts have been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more - close to 400 attributes! We continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country.

All this hard work in an effort to .. um ... well ... so that, you know ... um. I don't know why. What I do know, however, is that it allows Pandora to take one little piece of information -- a band you tell it you like -- and extrapolate that info to make a radio station of songs by other artists you might just like.

And it's free (as long as you don't mind a little visual advertising on the site -- and if you do mind you can pay a subscription fee, fancypants). For my first test drive, I typed "Jayhawks" into the blessedly simple, lone info field. After some thinking, the party gets started with a Calexico tune. Along with the album's artist, title and cover art, I get in the display panel (wonderfully designed, by the way -- very user friendly and pleasing to the eye) a little explanation of why that song was chosen (similarities were found in that both bands have country influences, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, and two or three other reasons). If you want to have a hand in shaping your radio station, you can give each song that comes up a thumbs or thumbs down to indicate whether things are on the right track or not. After Calexico, I got Ryan Adams, an actual Jayhawks song, some band I'd never heard of called Michael Zapruder, Robyn Hitchcock (which I wouldn't have thought of in the same context as Jayhawks in a million years, but it really worked), and Willie Nelson.

Other test drives yielded varying results. Starting a new station (once you register -- free and allegedly non-spammy -- you can make up to 100) with Son Volt, I got Cross Canadian Ragweed and then a whole bunch of unknowns, some good, some not so much. With Lyle Lovett, we got off on a bad foot. Somehow the next step was Aaron Tippin. Yeah. And then some ick from latter-day George Strait. But next came some band I'd never heard of that was pretty good, and then Doug Sahm and Dr. John. I think my radio station was starting to get the hang of it.

The folks at Pandora have made this service incredibly useful. There are thoughtful features like "Backstage," which is one-click info on the artist you're hearing, and bookmarking, which lets you make note of a song you like as it's playing so you can refer to it's info later. Because of the way the music is licensed to Pandora, it's not available outside the U.S. -- at least not yet. And the rules mean you can't call up songs on demand, and as you're generating your radio station you can skip only six songs an hour -- to thwart cheaters who would click endlessly until they find that one song they wanted to hear all along.

The click limitation is kind of a drag when you're getting assaulted with Aaron Tippin and George Strait and the like, but at the same time I kind of like how it preserves the spirit of the thing. You're going to hear some new stuff when you play with this, and you're going to hear some familiar stuff in a context that never occurred to you. As Pandora explains in its FAQs: "We don't care how popular the artist is, who's backing them, and we don't care which genre bin they usually belong in. Only the music matters."

So go, unleash the delicious evil contained in Pandora. And when you notice your must-have CD shopping list growing and your bank account shrinking, don't blame me. Blame Carlton.