Thanks Commenter John (and belatedly thanks Anna too). I should have tried Pandora sooner. It's played me more music that I like in two days than even a good radio station would in a month... and there aren't that many good radio stations/music channels. With an outfit like MTV, even if they still did anything as passé and eighties as playing music, the chances that they'd play me even one new good song per day are as small as a video editor's attention span. And all the stuff I've liked on Pandora has been bands I've never heard of: like Ulrich Snauss, G-Spliff and Band (O) Neon.

If it were recommending books, though, the accuracy would have to be a bit better because it's so much easier and cheaper to flip to the next song than the next novel. But then I'd give it more info than just a thumbs-up or thumbs-down each time I finished a book. I was joking in the comments on my original post when I mentioned using this technology for dating, but it makes you think doesn't it? Predictive music and movies, then books, and then maybe significant others. What, I wonder, would the great Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (from whose name we get 'algorithm') make of it. Or maybe a man who would have just celebrated his 1224th birthday, would find having a crater on the far side of the moon named after him more mind-blowing.