Double Edged

Pandora's [music] Box

I have a certain special Kyle to thank for this exciting tidbit of internet information. If you like music and don't really have a way of figuring out what's "out there" in your genre of choice, then Pandora is the website for you. It isn't perfect by any stretch and certainly isn't exhaustive but it is fairly extensive and quite robust. The developers of Pandora essentially wanted to figure out a way to map the underlying structure of the various types of music and then create a search engine which, more or less, tailors itself to whatever style of music you enter into the search bar. Actually, you enter either song names or band names and it does the rest by first playing that song or a song by the band and then generating a radio-esque playlist of bands/songs that are closest to the style of your first choice. You can also enter other bands from other genres in order to create what basically amounts to a customized internet radio station. If you sign up (which is free) you can have 100 different stations for your listening pleasure. You could have a station that plays rock and classical or rap and rythm and blues; the possibilities are only limited by how many different bands in different genres you know and the fact that their pool isn't exhaustive (which isn't really possible so you can't really complain about that).