One of the weekly news magazines had a report on various music resources on the web, and I decided to check one of them out, www.pandora.com. I must say I am impressed.

Essentially you specify some musicians or songs you like, and then it will then try to figure out what music other you might like and then create a "radio station" for you that plays the music it selects. You have the option of giving feedback as to whether you like the songs chosen or not, and it will then take this into account in what it later plays (it also will skip over songs you say you don't like, up to a certain limit each hour).

For example, if you are interested in Brazilian music, and know you like Jorge Ben Jor, or Carlinhos Brown, you might specify these two artists initially, and have it select and play songs for you based on these preferences. It is not perfect in making its selections (it essentially has characterized the music of each artist and tries to find other artists with similar characteristics), but generally it works pretty well. It has quite a bit of Brazilian music, but is a bit less complete in this regard than U.S. based music. And, for example, if you specify Jorge Ben Jor, it seems to have maybe four or five of his twenty or thirty albums in its collection and therefore not fully be able to figure out what about Jorge Ben Jor you like.

In any event, it is a good way to expand your musical horizons, or just to listen on your computer to music you probably will like.

As a caveat, perhaps many of you already know about this website, but it was new to me and I thought I'd pass it along, particularly since I previously participated in some of the music discussions here.

Excellent suggestion. I'm having fun with it.