Not sure how this technology is different from Pandora, except Pandora is better.
To tell you the truth, I had never heard of it before (neither the competitors). The first I heard was with Apple's purchase.
And as it usually is with Apple, you never know what they're going to turn it into. Whatever it is, you can bet they will be at the front of the market with it and it will burst on the scene like gangbusters, when Apple has finished doing to it what they are going to do.
For all I know, it may shut down now, and then something else come up in the future, when Apple finishes its work.
I just learned about Pandora (i hope its not like me coming on here and telling everyone about a cool video site called YouTube-LOL)
Heres what it does:
“Pandora has no concept of genre, user connections or ratings. It doesn’t care what other people who like Gomez also like. When you create a radio station on Pandora, it uses a pretty radical approach to delivering your personalized selections: Having analyzed the musical structures present in the songs you like, it plays other songs that possess similar musical traits.
Pandora relies on a Music Genome that consists of 400 musical attributes covering the qualities of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, composition and lyrics. It’s a project that began in January 2000 and took 30 experts in music theory five years to complete. The Genome is based on an intricate analysis by actual humans (about 20 to 30 minutes per four-minute song) of the music of 10,000 artists from the past 100 years. The analysis of new music continues every day since Pandora’s online launch in August 2005. As of May 2006, the Genome’s music library contains 400,000 analyzed songs from 20,000 contemporary artists. “
I entered in one of my favorite songs and it instantly started playing song after song of old favorites I had forgotten about or hadn’t heard in years. The drawback is you can’t go to a specific song-its more like hitting “random play” on your MP3 player that contains all your good music.