Find Your Go-To Karaoke Jam with a New Song Generator from the LA Times and Pandora

More than anything, singing karaoke is a way to have fun. So, picking the perfect song to perform alongside your friends at a bar or alone in your living room should never be stressful. And thanks to a new generator, finding your go-to karaoke song is now simple.

Credit: Jess Hutchinson

Pandora teamed up with the Los Angeles Times to put together the ultimate guide for discovering your karaoke songs, finding out where to sing them and more. To create the interactive generator, the LA Times first asked its readers for their top karaoke picks and why they love them. Then, they collected more than 600 suggestions and passed them along to Pandora’s Music Genome Project, a team made up of musicians and data analysts.

Led by Steve Hogan, the Music Genome Project used science and engineering to develop song recommendations into categories, such as vocal range, mood, difficulty and whether the song has an exceptional singalong chorus.

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“The Music Genome Project is a highly detailed musical taxonomy that allows us to describe songs and artists along many dimensions — including musicological characteristics (harmony, rhythm, melody); details of instrumentation and vocal performance; genre and stylistic influences; lyrics; studio production; and more,” said Hogan in an exclusive interview with the LA Times.

Credit: Steve Hogan

According to Hogan, the project has applied their analysis to millions of songs and hundreds of thousands of artists over the past 20 years, enabling them to develop recommendation strategies for their music-streaming products.

Learn more about how Pandora and the LA Times built the generator. Plus, check out more information about the Music Genome Project here.