On: Pandora Radio + Muxtape

So... a friend at work put me on to Pandora Radio, personalized online radio created by the Music Genome Project. It uses some 400+ characteristics or genes of a song, like tempo, genre influences, vocal harmony, and syncopation, to find other songs like it. I used to be a huge fan of last.fm but it seems that it's been suffering from more frequent hiccups and brain farts since it's fancy upgrade, so I was super keen on finding an alternative.

A bit disappointing: searches for Fela, Muhsinah, J*Davey, Afrodizz, and a whole bunch of what I'm listening to lately, were met by blank stares from my computer... ahahah. The social networking aspect is kind of impersonal, or maybe I don't get it. The adverts are large (taking up half the page) and flashy, but if I opt to pay about $40 a month, I can access the ad-free version of the site. And for some reason, the site has a strange habit of asking you to reload your browser due to program updates... about every 30 minutes of so.

Even with it's limited catalog, it actually fared better with soul, jazz and classical music, creating some pretty dope playlists... as well as some pretty boring ones. I think the best playlists and mixtapes I've ever received or created were the ones with a single string connecting an otherwise motley mashup from all corners, brand new along side throughbacks, maybe an instrumental thrown in for good measure. I found that Pandora's groupings with many similar songs weren't as interesting...

...segue...

I stumbled across Muxtape a minute ago and uploaded a Summer Commuting playlist [listen]:

Golden Brown, Better Daze
Twice, Little Dragon
Summertime, Brodsky Quartet + Björk
The Eraser, Thom Yorke
Track 01, Elliptical Ferns
Forever, Little Dragon
Reconstrut, Muhsinah
Four Corners, Digable Planets
Elliptical, Me'Shell Ndegéocelo + Sy Smith
Heartbeat, Nneka
Creator (vs. Switch and FreQuency), Santogold
Going On, Gnarles Barkley

What's on your summer mixtape/playlist?

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