Creative online music communities

These are so interesting, they're legal (users won't get sued by the RIAA!), and they seem to be popping up at an accelerating rate. The latest is Pandora.com, where digital-music fans can start their own radio stations (up to 100!) by telling Pandora their favorite tune or artist. Pandora will then consult the 300,000-song database of the Music Genome Project that fuels the service and compile a station that plays songs similar to your favorite in terms of musical attributes. Since 2000, when the Project started, it has taken 20-30 minutes per song for its 30 musician-analysts to "capture all of the little details that give each recording" its some 400 musical attributes ("melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics," etc.). Read more about the Music Genome Project here. The first 10 hours is free, a subscription is $36/year, and members can share their "stations" with friends. Here's PC World's review. Another really interesting community, Last.fm, has profiles, user photos, and email like MySpace, but it's even more musically focused. Here's a CNET review of both Pandora and Last.fm. Then there are collective-music-rating services Indy.tv and iRate radio, which - after you download the software and rate some tunes - send you new songs that fit your musical taste. Clearly, the legal music options are growing. But tell me what music fans at your house think of these - I'd like to hear from the real experts (via anne@netfamilynews.org)!

In P2P legal news, the CEO of popular Korean file-sharing service Soribada was indicted yesterday "on charges of copyright infringement," the Korea Herald reports (thanks to BNA Internet Law for point this out). In the US, the RIAA last week filed "its latest round of copyright infringement lawsuits," targeting 754 people in at least eight states from coast to coast," CNET reported.