So the hot new thing everyone’s talking about is Pandora, the latest in a long line of music recommendation services that promises to give you more of the kinds of music you want to hear. Well, I’ve heard that one before, folks, and so far it hasn’t worked out amazingly well. A couple of years ago I tried out a similar service; I don’t remember anything about it except that it no longer exists. And then there’s last.fm, which is a fantastic service for keeping track of the stuff you listen to and finding other people who share the same tastes, but using it to find new music isn’t the greatest idea; social networking apps have yet to figure out how to avoid the echo chamber effect, and that applies equally well to blogging, MySpace and last.fm. I look through the lists of my last.fm neighbours and I’ve already heard most of the stuff they have at the top of their charts. For example, take my first neighbour. His top ten? Broken Social Scene, Metric, Stars, Lush, Ladytron, Feist, Dressy Bessy, Pixies, I Am The World Trade Center, Broadcast. Been there, done that, wrote the screenplay, rolling out the line of merch. This is all somewhat moot, though, as I don’t generally plunge into the lists of my neighbours to find new music anyways. If you think about it, it’s actually a fair amount of work to troll through people’s lists and find stuff you haven’t heard of before, then track down the artist’s songs and give them a listen. Sorry, I’m a lazy ass; I just never get around to it.

Pandora works differently; it’s essentially a radio station you train with your tastes. Most music recommendation apps are actually more like Pandora than last.fm; the difference is that Pandora’s backed by a fair amount of rigorous-sounding classification called the Music Genome Project. But far more important than the specifics of how it recommends music to you is the interface. If you’ve ever rated music on Amazon, you know how Pandora works, and the effects of rating a song you’ve just listened to are immediate; the station changes immediately to play more music like the song you just gave a thumbs up, or stops playing music by any artist you’ve rejected two songs from. I’m still skeptical as to how well Pandora’s figuring out my tastes (umm, Olivia Newton-John? But I did kinda like “Living In Desperate Times,” actually…) but it’s hit at least one home run.

Pandora has decided that I might like Enon, specifically this track from their bits-and-pieces compilation from last year. And what do you know, Pandora’s right! But really what it’s trying to tell me is I should listen to my old roommate more often, because I’m pretty sure she’s got a copy of High Society and extolled its virtues at some point. Well, whatever. The point is, I’ve caught on to Enon’s whimsical brand of ass-shaking grooviness, and the fact that Pandora’s at least as good as a roommate when recommending music is a pretty good sign in my book.