As a heavy metal fan, I listen to some obscure bands, and I love them dearly. Now by obscure I don't mean like O! My God that's a name?! I mean obscure when compared to big wigs like Children Of Bodom.

My point is, sometimes its really hard to find a good band to listen to, and it's a rare occurence for someone to recommend a new album or a new band that just sits on my head.

Pandora does exactly that, and it does it bloody nicely. Vaibhav was telling me about this earlier today and I was simply floored. I already started a Lamb Of God station, and the service already recommended Sodom - M-16 which I seriously like.

Thankfully my connection is good enough to pay the song!

Now they're playing Buzrum for me, which is quite similar to Sodom in certain ways, but totally different in certain ways.

So the real question here is how do they do this?

The guys who started Pandora are really into their music, and the website further tells me that it's all part of "The Music Genome Project" So what they basically do is break the music down into attributes, like a sequence of DNA has pairs. But we're talking about hundreds of attributes. So for example, the song Sodom - M-16 is described as

hard rock roots
extensive vamping
minor key tonality
dirty electric guitar riffs
a gravelly male vocalist
an aggressive male vocalist
angry lyrics

Other Stuff:

1] The UI is pretty clean and easy to use.

2] After you listen to about four songs, they ask you to register with them. You can do so for free in which case they show you some ads or you can register with them for about 3USD to 12USD per month, which is pretty cheap considering how awesome they are!

3] License Issues. If you notice the player doesn't have a back button or rewind button.

I love this :D