Results tagged “barrymanilow”

There was a time in the 1970s when male artists could become famous by simply writing and singing great songs. Seemingly average joes such as Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Paul Simon, and Elton John sold millions of records without subscribing to the psychedelia of 60s rock, the angst of punk, the glam of the 80s, or the hyper-masculinity of metal and hip-hop. Today, acts such as Coldplay and James Blunt might hint at a resurgence...

In wanting to further refine his ability to predict what new music might appeal to you based on your current tastes, Tim Westergren, founder of the amazing streaming music service Pandora.com has spent the spring traversing the U.S. hosting town hall-style meetings to discover new and legendary artists and sounds at the grass roots level, taking in local venues and bands along the way. For the curious of the lot, Pandora is the webcast interface of the Music Genome Project, Westergren’s 10,000+ artist database which has rated over 100,000 songs drawing from all genres based on 400 different musical attributes such as tempo, instrumentation and vocal styles. Using this database, Westergren created an algorithm which takes your music preferences and returns other artists in the database with similar musical qualities (hear Tim describe how Pandora works in this podcast interview courtesy of TWiT.tv). So, if you’re a big Barry Manilow fan, Pandora can help you find other artists featuring blues influences, jazz influences, demanding vocal performances, acoustic sonority, and major key tonality to take you to your happy place.