I discovered a pretty cool and useful Facebook app named iLike a few days ago. It implements the "show me bands I like who are touring near me" very well, and it has all other nice kinds of social features built in. It's done way better than something that I could hack up in my spare time, and hence, I quit!

My only complaint is that it's very much designed for itunes and it doesn't provide a way to automatically import data from anywhere else. The interface does support a comma separated line input for favorite bands, however. So I hacked up a Pandora scraper. The Pandora scraper will get not just favorites, but also bands that you simply thumbed up more than once. As a bonus, it will print scores for each artist that are in your stations. It will run with any non-ancient version of Python, I tested with 2.4.

Here are the top 5 scores for me.

rob:~/code/more_live_music/src$ python pandora_parser.py rrenaud@gmail.com | head -n 5
Alanis Morissette 30
The Doors 28
Foo Fighters 26
Oasis 20
Red Hot Chili Peppers 18

The scores are simply the number thumbed up songs + 10 bonus for being in favorites.

Speaking of Pandora, please, please get a clue with your ads. I was listening to a station titled "Brett Dennen Radio", my location is set to New York, NY, and Brett had a show in New York in 3 days. What kind of ads was I seeing? McDonald's ads. Hint, I am a vegetarian, that's also in my profile. With ads targeted that poorly, maybe they just don't want to earn any money?

I am seriously thinking about implementing my concert alert for Pandora idea in my free time.

It would be nice if these things already existed.

• An open source library that turns an address (zip code, whatever) into some manageable form of geographic information, say a latitude/longitude pair.
  
  
• A library for actually manipulating lat/long pairs. Given a pair of coordinates, what is the distance between them? I suppose this will really just be a couple lines of Python, but it would probably be a lot of work for me to figure out the math and projections, etc.
  
  
• A database of concerts for lots of artists which I could query automatically and would return time/venue information.
  

For the first time, I called the offices of my senators and representatives to support the "Internet Radio Equality Act". In protest of a terrible, retroactive internet radio rate hike ruling by the Copyright Review Board, Pandora is holding a day of silence. Pandora along with a bunch of other internet radio stations aren't playing any music today. Instead, they are urging their listeners to call their senators about the radio equality bill, which will nullify the rate hike posed by the CRB. I obliged their request to contact my senators and representative in the house. Both senators, Clinton and Schumer, had live people on the phone answering calls. The representative, Jerry Nadler did not have anyone on the phone.

Interestingly, last.fm, the most popular internet radio station is not participating in the silence. One of the founders of last.fm,posted his defense of last.fm's position and is getting raked over the coals in his comments. They seem to have stopped approving comments since some time ago yesterday. last.fm was recently bought by CBS for $280 million. Presumably, last.fm has better rates signed in contract than the CRB laws mandate.

Does anyone else contact their representatives? Anyone else peeved by the decision?

Pandora probably has a better understanding of the music I like than I do. It would be cool if Pandora notified me when artists I like are playing around me. It seems like there is even some room for monetization there, especially given that people say the real money for music is in live performances rather than selling music itself. Given the price I paid to attend a few concerts (~$500 for to for a pair of tickets to 3 different concerts), vs the total amount of money I have spent purchasing music (~$0), I believe it.

I just started using Pandora today. It's awesome. You start by telling it an artist you like, it streams music of the same style. You give it feedback on the music it selects, and it tailors itself to your tastes. It just works so well. I can't recommend it enough.

It's like irate radio except with more than just indie music. The recommendations are a lot better, the UI is a lot slicker, and the music is in general higher quality. Sadly, it's not open source, and you don't get permanent copies of the music. But other than that, it is pretty much flawless.