I’m back from a brief vacation in Europe, which — he said by clever way of segue — brings up the thing I wanted to post on. The friend I traveled with had been telling me for some time about Pandora Internet Radio. Their gimmick, essentially, is that when you tell them what music you like, they’ll tell you what else you’ll like. I’m normally skeptic about this sort of thing, which pops up on the other music services I use, iTunes and Napster, plenty, and I’ve never found that useful. But I’ve been listening to Pandora for all of five minutes now and I’ve already found four songs I’ll be downloading when I get home.

This by itself probably isn’t all that SMITHy, but what caught me was the introduction written on the page:

Ever since we started the Music Genome Project, our friends would ask:

Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.

We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.

I like that, a whole lot. Speaking as someone who often serves as a personal DJ for people — making mixtapes/playlists, passing on musical wisdom if not the music itself (uh, not that I would do anything that would violate copyright) — I love the idea of having the entire world as my personal DJ, being able to go on the Internet, say what I like, and have a program that (accurately) goes back and sees what other people with similar musical tastes would tell me to listen to, if they could. Pandora seems to be the first, unlike iTunes and Napster, to have hit on the right formula to do just that.