There was an excellent article in TidBITS today about a music streaming and recommendation service called Pandora. It piqued my interest, as I'm always keen to explore new music, and was curious about how well it would actually do at finding music I'd like.

The idea is that you give it the name of an artist or a song you like, it classifies that music (by musical characteristics, rather than conventional genres), and it plays you a series of tracks that share some similarities with that music. You can indicate that you particularly like a track to hear more songs like that, or that you dislike it to exclude that song and those like it.