Pandora, Begorrah!

Click "TEXT VIEW" in the box above for most engaging results. Click any title and Pandora takes you to information and a sample. "VISUALIZER" is cool, too, though less informative.

"Quick, who's the one person who has been nominated for an Oscar more often than anyone else in any category? That would be composer John Williams, nominated over 40 times for his original film scores and orchestrations. He received his first Oscar nomination in 1969 for the score to Valley of the Dolls, and since then he has become the most recognized film composer in history, not just because of his scores, but also because he has successfully followed in Arthur Fiedler's footsteps as conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra." --from Pandora (which provides a bio of nearly every artist on their site)

Here's a product endorsement: get Pandora! It's free, and it has introduced me to more new music than I can begin to list here. I also like listening to various internet radio stations, iTunes, tuning into LastFM and a variety of podcasts, but Pandora is my favorite. Why? This site features the Music Genome Project that intuitively calls up songs you're likely to like (and wow, is it accurate!) Up until this fall it was a commercial free, bug-free site. Now there's a tiny commercial every 1/2 hr or so, but it's not bothersome. The only fault of Pandora is a fault of my own: bandwith. That's all that's ever stopped Pandora from being a high performance machine!

Now back to John Williams. From Star Wars to Indiana Jones, from Superman to Jaws, Williams is all that! Pandora's music genome project has further led me to parallel artists from Hans Zimmerman, Philip Glass, Danny Elfman and Jerry Goldsmith to lesser-knowns like Jeff Johnson.

I am so impressed with his work that I have a John Williams station at Pandora, and it plays hours of epic soundtrack tunes just like I need when I'm contemplating the origins of the universe or grading papers...like I should be now!