Do you remember mix tapes? I had some friends in high school who spent hours picking just the right songs and then copying them over one by one. As CDs replaced tapes, the process became easier and faster. As we are all moving to digital, even burning a CD seems a little old school.
The Web 2.0 version of the mix tape is something along the lines of Pandora. Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project – this is essentially what librarians do to music when they corner it in a dark alley. Songs get tagged with an elaborate taxonomy as a way to bridge music with similar qualities together. Instead of building playlists the old fashioned way – song by song – Pandora allows you to “seed” a channel with a few favorite tunes or artists. Pandora then plays those songs or artists along with similar tunes. You can mold the channel over time by giving songs a thumbs up or down as they come up.
So I have a few virtual mix tapes to share with you. The first few are Pandora stations that I’ve been working on as I try to kick my workout up a notch. The last one is the pre-Webinar on-hold music that you’ve heard if you arrive at a Geonetric Webinar before it begins.
You can find them all at http://www.pandora.com/people/ben.dillon6