Wow, an amazing music discovery tool

It's called Pandora and based on the Music Genome Project. The MGP is an attempt to catalogue as much music as possible according to hundreds of different genes or traits of each song. These might be the particular beats, the instruments, the vocal style, the sort of lyrics of the writer -- anything that could conceivably distinguish one song from another. That way, if you like a particular artist or song, it's possible to identify other songs that could be of interest based on shared genes. And the interface is dazzingly simple: you put in a song or artist which gives Pandora a starting point. It will pick a few songs that are similar to your choice. If you like a song, it will try to pick more like it; if you don't, it will try another direction. It's really quite clever. It's kind of cool seeing some of the music you like dissected -- sometimes you know you like a song, but you don't know why. Pandora will highlight some of the salient features of the song that caused it to choose it for you. Try one of my favorite groups: Gotan Project.