Ever since Eric Zorn mentioned Pandora on his blog, I’ve been hooked.

Pandora is an Internet radio station with a major twist. It’s a product of the Music Genome Project, which has spent the past 5 years categorizing the music of over 10,000 artists.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. 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.

What happens is, you choose an artist and then Pandora programs a station. You can add other artists to the station and create as many as 100 stations.

The service is very interactive. If you don’t like a song, or think it doesn’t belong, just tell Pandora how you feel and it won’t play that song ever again. If you really like the song you can tell Pandora to play more like it.

Right now, I’m decompressing, browsing your comments from today and listening to my Wilco station. Currently playing is a song by Shipwreck Union. I’m a happy man.

I haven’t had a lot of time to tinker with it yet because of session, but here are my stations so far:

· Wilco

· Waylon Jennings/Robert Earl Keen

· Rolling Stones

· Bob Dylan/Grateful Dead

· Fats Domino

· Sinatra

I’ve been a moonshiner
for seventeen long years
and I spent all my money
on whiskey and beer
and I go to some hollow
and set up my still
if whiskey don’t kill me
Lord, I don’t know what will