This is one fantastic site:
http://www.pandora.com/ 
If you like a band or certain types of music and want to find more artists of that type, this will help steer you in that direction. You can fine-tune your likes and dislikes so it will play more and more
of what you really like to listen to. It's not audiophile, it plays 128 Kbps streams, but it's turning me on to music I like and I've never heard before.
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The Music Genome Project
On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.
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.
Over the past 5 years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time.
This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.
It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy - but now that we've created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore
your favorite parts of the music universe.
We hope you enjoy the journey.
Tim Westergren
Founder
The Music Genome Project
