Melanie Colburn (filling in for John Battelle on SearchBlog) has a post on different kinds of music search services — services to help match your tastes with music you might like but maybe have not heard before.

I’ve spent a good deal of time playing around with Pandora. So far, I’m not impressed. At least for my tastes. It’s interesting that they can deduce that I might like a song with major tonality, mixed acoustic and electronic instrumentation and guitar pickin’ and demanding instrumental part writing. But that still doesn’t mean I’m going to like The Decemberists.

For all its efforts, Pandora has yet to introduce me to a worthwhile artist. The best stuff that fits my taste (I’ve set up channels for Dave Alvin, Nick Lowe, The Kinks and Johnny A), I’ve already heard.

I just tried MusicLens. All I can say is that any music search that recommends Kenny Rogers to me isn’t likely to make me a loyal user.

Of course, some day, somebody is going to get music search recommendations right.