In the heyday of the dot-com boom, I recall listening to internet radio over Spinner, a little application with around one hundred streaming music stations categorized by genre. I have great memories of Spinner’s Acid Jazz station playing for hours, as I hacked away at the marketing plan for a startup company. Spinner was eventually acquired by AOL and has descended into relative obscurity.

Cue the next generation of streaming music services. Pandora impresses with the music genome project, its extensive catalogue of songs and their musical attributes. As a listener, you create stations based on a single song or artist and Pandora proceeds to deliver music with similar musical characteristics, such as instrumentation, melody, or lyrics. You can rate individual songs positively or negatively, providing Pandora with further information to refine the station according to your preferences. The results are impressive — a well refined station plays like your own custom radio station without the commercial interruptions.

There is an on-going debate about which service is best as helping people discover new music. Another provider, Last.fm, relies on social recommendations and culls related songs according to popularity (a kind of Pagerank algorithm for music?) rather than musical character. Regardless of which selction methods works better, Pandora, and probably also Last.fm, are both great for those extended moments of passive listening. The right music can energize productivity: I turn to my Gotan Project station for projects involving right-brain thinking, while a retro Cars station seems to work exceedingly well for blogging.