PrintIt’s midterms season, I’ve retreated to the stacks with a mug of green tea and a looming stack of psych notes, and I’m sick of everything on my iPod. I want to listen to something mellow, something with easily dismissible lyrics that’s still pleasant enough to comfort me as I descend into a hell of sodium pumps, acetylcholine, and nigrostriatal pathways. Three-plus hours of Broken Social Scene, with their muted lyrics and pretty melodies, was once ideal for situations like this. But those 45 songs have been my test-prep soundtrack since tenth grade—and they now elicit a negative response of near-Pavlovian proportions.
Taking advantage of an unusually strong Wi-Fi signal, I head over to Pandora.com and create a station based on “Broken Social Scene.” Within seconds, I have a stream of songs, all characterized by “mellow rock instrumentation” and “a subtle use of vocal harmony.” If a song is too boisterous, I can give it a thumbs down and move to something quieter. If it’s perfect, I can give it a thumbs up and look forward to more like it. Problem solved, right?
In the past several years, a flock of music-recommendation services have sprouted up on the Internet. Though each site has its nuances—and some are better than others—all boast huge databases and super-smart technologies, which seek to identify our tastes and make personalized recommendations. Pandora, an Internet radio and music recommendation service, is a favorite among Columbia students. Users enter the name of a favorite song or artist, and Pandora will stream songs that it deems similar, based on over 400 attributes identified and catalogued in their database. Columbia College sophomore Xander Ciucci likes the site because, as he says, “It’s free and convenient.” Yuriy Nartov, a Columbia College sophomore, praises Pandora’s clean interface and limited ads. It’s not perfect, though: “I find it repeating songs quite a lot,” Nartov says.
Another campus favorite is Last.fm, a British site that tracks, or “scrobbles,” the number of times you play a song on your computer and mp3 player. It compiles this data to create personalized lists of preferences and recommendations. Last.fm users can also create profiles, connect with friends, and view biographies and photos of artists.
Willie Avendano, a SEAS sophomore, is working this fall as an intern for BandsInTown.com, a lesser-known startup that focuses on live music. BandsInTown, which has been around for a little less than two years and recently underwent a major re-launch, compiles personalized lists of concerts in an area and links to buy tickets. “It can be conceptualized as Pandora for concerts in your area,” Avendano says. “Intuitively, it’s very cool and very useful.” The service also lets users sort concerts by distance and cost.
As overworked college students, we really don’t have the time to parse endless blogs, page through magazines, listen to the radio, and make trips to the record store. Sites like Pandora, Last.fm, and BandsInTown make our lives easier by sorting through information and bringing it straight to us. Avendano stresses that BandsInTown’s recommendation service is “next-generation” and “even better than Pandora’s,” since it factors in subtle variables like a song’s kitsch value. But finding new songs and artists online can also mean losing an integral part of the music discovery experience. Pandora’s right—most of my favorite music is characterized by “mellow rock instrumentation,” “folk influences,” and “a vocal-centric aesthetic.” But can my tastes really be so clearly delineated? These kinds of sites assume that our tastes are inherent and immovable—but is this true?
Music discovery has long been a collective process, facilitated by radio, magazines, and word-of-mouth. Web sites like these make it into something that is largely individual. With only my own pre-existing tastes as a guide, I can delve further into genres I know I like. Thinking outside that box, though, is impossible. It’s easy to wind up limited rather than liberated by our individualized freedom of choice.
Even in the digital age, real-life experience constitutes a huge part of music culture. There are many songs I can’t listen to without remembering the first time I heard them: Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” album will forever remind me of a family beach vacation the summer before seventh grade, Bob Dylan’s “Blood On The Tracks” will always make me think of my dad, and T.I.’s single “Whatever You Like,” for better or for worse, will yield flashbacks of sweaty nights and poor choices at Campo freshman year. Similarly, there are artists I’ve seen in concert who I didn’t like beforehand and loved after the fact. Music is more than the sum of its sounds: it’s influenced by experience and the subtleties that concept entails.
No matter how next-gen it is, I highly doubt a computer program can understand why a certain Simon and Garfunkel song always makes me want to curl up and cry, or just how good that trashy Lady Gaga single feels when it hits my weary brain at full volume. And that’s fine by me.
Sites like Pandora, Last.fm, and BandsInTown are helpful and totally worth using, especially when they make the difference between listening to a tired old Chili Peppers disc or finding an exciting new artist—or between a night of munching on Wheat Thins in your Nussbaum kitchen and seeing a live show. Their ever-improving technologies can identify and incorporate many subtle factors, finding recordings and concerts that you’ll love. Of course, they can’t take everything into account. At least, not yet.