After I had previously praised the music streaming site Pandora (see blog post here) I rather dejectedly advised you recently of the disappearance of Pandora for everyone outside of the US (see post here). While Finetune remains my favourite music streaming site I have found an alternative: Soundpedia.

Unfortunately, I am not too keen on the interface (it is a bit full on and candy cane for me for a music streaming site), however, it is easy to use and for those of you missing Pandora this is a viable alternative as a way to learn new music.

I know, I am very late to report this but it sucks. I have previously posted about how cool the Pandora website and the whole concept was. Basically, you select an artist and then through a process called the Genome Music Project Pandora streams other music to you that is deemed similar. You can rate the songs if you like them or not, from which it builds up your profile and suggests more music in your style. It worked really well for me.

Unfortunately, it seems there are issues with license agreements outside of the US - and that sucks for the rest of us in the world!

In the meantime I keep listening to my other favourite Internet music, Fine Tune.

For something a little bit different this week. I was in a meeting last week in Hamilton when the music website Pandora was raised. This is a very cool website which streams live music based on a theme or style of music you select. You start by selecting an artist and then Pandora plays more music that is classified as similar to that artist. You can add more artists to your selection at anytime. For me I have found some cool new music that I like based on the stuff I already listen to.

But, my new cool site that I like is Fine Tune. This site allows you to build up your own playlist from all the artists you like - you can only select 3 or 4 songs per artist and must have at least 45 songs to make your playlist active. You start by selecting one artist or song and then Fine Tune suggests other similar artists and you can build up you selection from there. It is interesting seeing how Artists are viewed as similar through only a few degrees of seperation. Check out my playlist - it took only a few interim bands to get from Eminem to Ben Harper to Avril Lavigne!