One of the reasons I enjoy online streaming platforms like Spotify and Pandora is because they introduce me to new music that I might not otherwise know of. It is accepted fact that we tend to have strong affinity for music that was popular during our formative years. For me, those were the 1960's and 70's, an era that has retained significant staying power and is enjoyed by many generations. Even though I regularly return to this music, I've never stopped seeking out new music and online streaming platforms are very, very capable at serving up new tunes for me.
Pandora was the first service I subscribed to (around 2006), partly because their service was capable of providing recommendations based on the "Music Genome Project"—a means of classifying individual songs by musical traits. The Music Genome Project is an effort to "capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level using various attributes to describe songs and mathematics to connect them together into an interactive map. Any given song is represented by approximately 450 "genes" (analogous to trait-determining genes for organisms in the field of genetics). Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music.
Other streaming platforms might not be based on this exact methodology but several of them are also quite good at coalescing playlists around common musical traits. The early forms of all these projects were "pre-AI" but provided functionality that was still quite intelligent.
So far, I've retained a Pandora subscription but at any given time I'm likely to also have one or more subscriptions with Spotify, Apple, Amazon Prime, YouTube or the like. I don't keep them for long, usually dipping into their ecosystem for a while just to check on what they're doing. It's a kind of addiction I suppose. One day I might switch from Pandora as my main fix but so far, I haven't needed to.
Caroline Polacheck
Caroline Polacheck is an example of an artist whose music I ran across while listening to Pandora's "Alt+Pop Radio Station" (or something like that). She is talented on several fronts including composition, arranging, production, instruments (including synthesizers) and vocals. If you aren't familiar with her work, I invite you to take a listen.
From Wikipedia, Caroline Elizabeth Polachek (born June 20, 1985) is an American singer, producer, and songwriter. Raised in Connecticut, Polachek co-founded the indie pop band Chairlift while studying at the University of Colorado. The duo emerged from the late-2000s Brooklyn music scene with the sleeper hit "Bruises".
Polachek has worked extensively with other artists, collaborating with Blood Orange, Fischerspooner, Charli XCX, Oneohtrix Point Never and Flume, as well as writing material for Beyoncé ("No Angel")
- Smoke
- Door
- Pretty In Possible
- So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings
- Butterfly Net
- Sunset
- Crude Drawing Of An Angel
Notes
The audio player in this post, plays the audio portion of a YouTube Playlist.
This playlist is also available on the platforms indicated below and can be accessed by clicking any of their icons. Spotify, Pandora and YouTube all provide free, ad-supported accounts as well as paid, ad-free accounts.
