LRHB Industries Dept. of Public Records

You know, I listen to music nearly all day long, but in the last 4 days, I haven’t opened iTunes once thanks to Pandora, a new service from the people who brought us the Music Genome Project.

In case you’re unfamiliar, the Music Genome Project painstakingly categorized about 10,000 artists spanning the entire gamut of musical genres over the last 5 years. The result was an awesome tool which let you explore artists you liked to discover artists you hadn’t heard of, but have a good chance of liking as well.

With Pandora, that information is put to very good use, allowing you to enter an artist, or even just a song, to create a streaming radio station that you tune and customize with thumbs ups and thumbs downs. You can rename, share, and add or remove artists and songs to a station, and you can have up to 100 stations if you sign up. There’s also a subscription model that offers you some added benefits for monthly and yearly fees if you’re so inclined to support their efforts.

If you haven’t already, give Pandora a chance. My current radio stations range from Olympia indie rock to West coast rap, spanning the history of ska to down home country music. The selection is amazing.

More here at Pandora.