I have been considering writing a article about the new Genius embedded software that you can find in iTunes 8.0 or greater while comparing it to last.fm and Pandora as far as music recommendation apps go. Until I get going on that I thought it would a stellar idea to post regular Genius-created playlists and then invite readers to post their Genius playlist for the same base song.

If you are in the dark: Genius takes any song in iTunes you are playing (or have atleast highlighted) and offers recommendations from the iTunes store in the right sidebar. It will suggest songs that are not in your current collection from both the same artists and from similar artists. When you click the Genius icon (imagine a symbol representing a molecule, without a nucleus but with three rings of electrons and neutrons), it offers you a playlist between 25 and 100 songs from your own collection based on the musical tastes of other iTunes users who share the same base song and similar collections. The results are somewhat interesting yet often times very standard. You may even say "well, duh" when you see which songs from your own mp3 collection Genius chooses. Unless you download dozens of mp3s daily from blogs and band websites without listening to them all (like I have been known to do), then you are not going to really discover new artists the same way you can from Pandora.

So, this week I will start with the latest single from MGMT, "Kids". I chose it based on a recent conversation with my friend Kelly in L.A. who says the song is all over the radio out there. Here is the 25 song playlist from my own collection that Genius has designed.

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