Have you played with Pandora.com? If you like exploring new music, you really should.

The idea is that you enter a band name that you like, and they play a song that “exemplifies” that band’s style. You tell them whether you like it or not and they play more music based on your likes and dislikes. As you listen you can also add more band names to refine or get more diverse styles of music going. You can then save these choices as a “station,” and even share it with your friends (you know… the whole Web 2.0 thing).

I entered CocoRosie (for reasons that should be obvious), and am listening to the results as we speak. So far, I like two out of the three I’ve heard. Neither of them are at all like CocoRosie, but I can totally understand why they were chosen. Okay… this is crazy… they just played Scout Niblett who I already love. It’s like they’re reading my mind…

Alas, they are not. It’s all very scientific and based on a project called The Music Genome Project. One neat feature of Pandora is the “Why did you play this link” (click on the album cover of the currently playing song). I’ve been playing with it, and I’ve kind of learned something about my own tastes.

It’s not perfect, of course. You can’t download the music it plays to put on your MP3 player (although, if you do searches for the bands, you can probably find some MP3s at their sites plus it gives you link to buy the music at iTunes or Amazon). And there’s always going to be bands who you absolutely love that aren’t going to be in their database, but as it stands, it’s all really interesting and entertaining. You should go try it out. You can’t break anything, and you’ll probably end up discovering something really cool.

The initial use of it doesn’t require any registration and will play only for a little while. After that you can register for a free account that’s supported by ads, or if you want to plunk down a small amount money, you can get the ads removed.