I love Pandora and its human based suggestion engine, the Genome Project. In this article, The New York Times explores Pandora and how it and others find your new favorite song. And it isn’t by collaborative filtering…

“However things play out for Pandora as a business, its approach is worth understanding if you’re interested in the future of listening. It’s the “social” theories of music-liking that get most of the attention these days: systems that connect you with friends with similar tastes, or that rely on “collaborative filtering” strategies that cross-match your music-consumption habits with those of like-minded strangers. These popular approaches marginalize traditional gatekeepers; instead of trusting the talent scout, the radio programmer or the music critic, you trust your friends (actual or virtual), or maybe just “the crowd.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/magazine/18Pandora-t.html?em