Song by song, the music-loving technologists at Pandora scrutinize and document hundreds of notes on characteristics ranging from melody, to arrangement, to instrumentation. They don’t care about genre or what the bands looks like, but only about the qualities of each individual song.

When you do a search for an artist or a song, they compare the database of hundreds of notes against all the songs in the database. Then, based on all of the commonalities and differences, Pandora puts together a playlist of songs and begins the show.

Example: When I do a search for The Stills, it returns songs based on basic rock song structures, repetitive melodic phrasing, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, a vocal-centric aesthetic, minor key tonality, and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.

Radio has never been more advanced. Things get really interesting when you add multiple songs and artists to a single station and then it pulls results based on all of those. As soon as you get a chance, check it out at http://pandora.com. You can look me and my stations up by going here http://pandora.com/people/bradleyjond.

There’s no better way to listen to the music you love and be introduced to more.