The game of marketing music is often a challenging one for music companies. Most artists rely on your friends to recommend their music or the radio to advertise for them. However recently such alternatives are becoming less and less needed with the advent of sites that are built around the idea of both social networking via music and some sites that link songs by similarities in artistic style.

As always the way I learned about these new technologies is by using them which I find is a much better way to learn about something than to read that oh so reliable Wikipedia.

My adventure began when my dad started blathering on about Pandora (the music genome project) which functions on a not so revolutionary idea of linking together similar sounding music with an original kind of execution.

Instead of just saying that all music in the same genre sounds the same the service takes into account strong vocals or pounding base. This way its not the linking of System of a Down and Slipknot because they are both metal bands in a limited view, instead you see links like System Of a Down to God Smack because both bands feature a strong Melody with emphasis on vocals.

This makes for a much better music experience when non popular bands or bands you did not ask for are put into the mix because its much more likely that the music will be worth listening too.

As for the big name generic music providers apple has taken the charge on linking music by the proper method rather than genre.

iTunes now has the Genius playlist which tries to mimic the functionality of Pandora through its own method. The only downside is the fact that the related music system requires people to manually (or once a week in an automatic fashion that I have yet to see) update the remote servers that allow music to be linked. That being said after updating I tend to find that any song in my library that exists in either a playlist or my recently played list can be matched via the service regardless of its point of origin.