+ Yahoo to shut down Yahoo Photos service, push Flickr (via Reuters)

+ Pandora to block non-US listeners (via BBC)
This is sad news. Not only is Pandora a wonderful service (it’s also a massive amount of fun) for music geeks (like the RS team) but it also demonstrates the power of high-quality and well organized metadata. Example? Pandora employs a team of musicians, music experts, and others to listen to each and every track on a CD and assign various attributes (what they call “musical genes”).
From the Pandora site:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

We can only hope the licensing issues are resolved soon. In the mean time, I would bet technically savvy users are using open proxies to access the service.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 12:47 am and is filed under Databases, Directories, and Guides, Information Industry, Intellectual Property, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.