Music geeks are everywhere. Those are the people that are more than willing to talk for two hours about how Kraftwerk is the most underrated band of all time, buy new albums in vinyl, go to concerts of artists they’ve never heard before, play instruments like the melodica and glockenspiel, and are generally obsessed with all things musical. These people are a sad breed, constantly looking for an outlet for new forms of musical expression. For free. Napster is dead. An eleven-year-old girl got arrested for downloading music. The music industry is the crony fueling the mass capitalism that will fall when the proletariat unties and revolts. Cough.
If you have any of these symptoms, the remedy is here. The Music Genome Project sponsored by Savage Beast Technology has finally been completed. This endeavor has been one of the extensive cataloging of modern music to date. Hundreds of music experts and critics gathered together to organize songs from over 10,000 artists into a huge database. The songs were analyzed and categorized according to their structure, sound, instrumentation, and 400 other specific musical characteristics. These people are true music geeks.
The Music Genome is now available for the masses at www.pandora.com. After you register for free, you can begin to create your own playlists or radio stations. Simply pick an artist or a song, and Pandora will search the database for you to create a playlist of similar songs. As the songs play, you can edit which songs and what types of songs you want played in this playlist.
Skeptical of how accurate this would be, I tried it out with some of my favorite bands who are “obscure”. After my Pavement, Super Furry Animals, and Neutral Milk Hotel playlists were created, I was amazed, and almost disconcerted as to how similar the other songs, by other artists on the playlist resembled the ones that I had entered. I created a Frank Sinatra playlist to ease my nerves. Then after I was tired of the crooner’s, I chilled out to some Matisyahu. Beastie Boys. Bob Dylan. Herbie Hancock.
And for those of you who are musicians, the deal gets even sweeter. You can submit your own songs to the project. If they get accepted, when someone wants to hear some Joy Division, they might end up hearing the local band that played at the coffehouse last night. In the short time I used it, one band that was very obscure that I had listened to came up in my Pavement playlist. The only thing bad about the playlist is there is no classical or world music. But if you have a real hankering for Stravinski or the latest Pakistani pop, you’ll have to go somewhere else.
If you are not a music geek, you may never understand the ecstasy that comes when your hear the fuzz box click on or the sweet wail of the vocalist. You may not understand why some people will sleep in tents outside of box office to pay ridiculous amounts for a ticket in the nosebleeds. You may not understand why someone owns every record Parliament and Funkadelic ever made, but you should be able to understand why free, personalized music is exciting. Take a look, and dive into the Gene Pool.
