Pandora claims to have a single mission: "To play only music you'll love." For those of you not familiar with Pandora, it acts as a personal, customized radio station that with input from the user, works to play music customized to the listener's tastes. The New York Times recently published a piece titled "The Song Decoders" that looks at how the musicologists and computer scientists at Pandora work behind the scenes to make sure the music you hear on your personal Pandora stations is to your liking.

These musicologists break out hundreds of data points for each song, but ignore the one factor that is a mainstay of so many other music discovery sites: Popularity. When the cultural influence of your peers and the music taste-makers is removed from the equation, you may be surprised at what you actually like.

In the New York Times article, Pandora's founder Tim Westergren relays an anecdote that explains the implications of removing popularity from computer music discovery algorithms. 

...a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’ ”

So if you have not tried Pandora yet it may be worth a spin, especially since a growing number of TVs and Blu-ray players are now built to stream it. (See "Internet TVs get more streaming options" and our post on new features for Blu-ray players.) Pandora's innovative approach to decoding songs may have applications in other data decoding areas in the future. And don't worry, no one will tell your friends if—against all odds—you wind up actually liking Britney Spears. —Dirk Klingner