Pandora: The Music Genome Project

Some coworkers demonstrated a really cool Internet radio station to me today. There's nothing to download -- everything is in a Flash window. What's different about it than say, iTunes Internet radio, is that it will base its songs on musical characteristics of songs you like. At any time you can press the "Oh I hate this song" button and it will figure out something about it musically that you don't like (bad chord progression, heavy guitar usage etc.) and adjust itself. Unlike a typical radio station, you can skip songs all together.

The backend research for all this is intriguing -- breaking songs down into common genomic parts. Just goes to show how music is built out of pieces of prior music.