Love List #6: Hearing No Evil with Pandora

The next generation of Internet Radio has arrived, and, Nurses, let me tell you, I am addicted.

You see, now, my story begins, once upon a time, when Yahoo!Music first started letting music lovers build their own radio stations. But - like a heroin dealer that gets you hooked and then gets mowed down in the street during a gang way - they cut me off when they refused to upgrade their system to make it compatible with Mac OS X. BITCHES!

I would go back frequently, in the hopes they would correct this egregious error, but - alack, alas - they were clearly too busy coming up with new downloadable games or some shit to get off their asses and code and upgrade. Alternatives? Not so much. iTunes radio stations are about as stimulating as exposed brick, and others I tried sucked hard enough to leave dick hickeys. Until now.

Because, thanks to the Music Genome Project, which has catalogued a vast collection of music (growing more vast every day) by attributes like the kind of vocals, instrumentation, musical styles, beats - just about anything you could use to describe music. Then you tell them what artists you like, and they stream artists with similar qualities. When you like or don't like a song, you tell them so, and they compare the attributes with other songs you liked or didn't like to whittle it down until eventually you're getting exactly the early '90s grunge with heady guitar riffs or mid-20th century female jazz vocalists you desire. But, hell, why am I describing? YOU JUST GOT TO HEAR IT!

A NOTE ABOUT THE IMAGE: The gorgeous picture of our friend Avril which I used, somewhat metaphorically, to illustrate this piece is part of an amazing campaign sponsored by Aldo shoes in support of YouthAIDS. Learn more about how you can support this immensely worthy cause by visiting www.youthaids-aldo.org.