Pandora is a “Music Genome Project” that,“…ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”
It’s been around since 2000 and has evolved into a unique way of listening to streamed music, bookmarking your favorites and even liking directly to iTunes. You can select an artist, (eg. LTJ Bukem) and Pandora will stream relevent music making it easy to discover independent artists and music that otherwise would take some effort. This would be an awesome thing to have with a future Apple iPhone, or any high speed hand held. Check it out.