Genius vs Pandora

• Genius is a playlist-creating feature of iTunes. You click on a track in your collection, and Genius drafts a queue of tracks it thinks will go well with it. It only plays tracks you own, but it suggests purchases that will fit the theme.
• Pandora is an online radio site that uses the music genome project to generate radio "stations" to your liking. You pick a song or artist, and it gins up a playlist of songs that are musically similar, most of which you've probably never heard before. You can skip songs, and give a thumbs up or down to those you like or hate, but you can't make it play a specific song at any given instant.

Genius scores big in the category of "familiar songs you can sing along with" but Pandora gets the "expanding my horizons" award.

Pandora tells you exactly why it chose a song:

"we're playing this song because it features electric rock instrumentation, acoustic rhythm piano, blues influences, mixed minor and major key tonality, and demanding instrumental part writing."

Genius mostly just points me at a genre, and other tracks by the same artist. Sadly, neither recognizes Loin Groove. :(

Seeding a Genius list from "Subterranean Homesick Blues" got nearly the same songs as one seeded from "Tales of Brave Ulysses". The same experiment in Pandora generates distinctly different stations. Was this a failure of Genius, though, or just a failure of my classic rock collection? To say for sure, I'll need to try a few different genres.

Seeding a Genius list from "Audrey's Dance" (a sultry and mysterious jazz number on the Twin Peaks soundtrack) brought up "Rabbit of Seville" (classical music punctuated by Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd) and "Waiting For Somebody" (light and boppy alternarock from the Singles soundtrack). Further down the playlist were Johnny Cash, Trent Reznor, and most of the Lord of the Rings. The unifying theme seems to just be "from a soundtrack".

On the other hand, maybe Audrey's Dance is just a bad seed choice. The playlists where very different, but both had things I would never have thought to pair with it. Pandora brought up covers of the theme songs to Dr Who and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for example. It was at least able to tell me what they had in common, musically, with Audrey's Dance. Things like:

intricate melodic phrasing, a busy horn section, acoustic rock instrumentation, mild rhythmic syncopation, extensive vamping, and punk influences

I guess I need to play around more with both before writing either off, though I'm leaning heavily in favor of Pandora at the moment. It doesn't mix "Requiem For A Dying Song" with "The Bad Touch" unless I tell it to.