[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
I just caught an excellent edition of Inside the Net featuring Tim Westergren, the genius behind the Music Genome Project and Pandora. It provides some pretty interesting insights. I didn't realize that the Music Genome Project (the system that powers Pandora's music recommendations) is actually staffed by a team of trained musicians; they manually listen to every single track and use a taxonomy to tag a tune's musical qualities. So while Pandora appears algorithmic and it's tempting to contrast it to the human-powered service Last.fm (which applies a "people who liked X also liked Y" system), there are actually a lot of human minds behind it. Tim also points out that many Amazon-style recommendation engines are really popularity contests - I'm not sure how true this is, but I certainly find that Pandora drags me down the long tail of music, while Last.fm seems to stick with mainstream artists.
As far as I'm concerned, Pandora is the leader in its field . It will no doubt be acquired in the not-too-distant future.