Am I The Last Person To Hear About This?

Today, as I was reading the New York Times Magazine section, I came across an article about this new music 'service' called Pandora. You type in a song, and it creates radio stations for you based on characteristics of the song, and eventually it branches out to finding you new music (something that always concerns me, now that I have no life and radio is essentially dead as a way of finding new music). They have some weird way of analyzing songs to get at inherent characteristics of what you like and finding similar songs. I thinks iTunes' Genius is very similar, but that takes stuff you've already gotten.

I have a couple of issues so far. When I typed in my favorite band (Squeeze, for the .000001% of the readers of this site who wouldn't know that), it popped up with The Ten Hour Long Song -- Black Coffee in Bed, as a starting off point. What to do? As Squeeze goes, it's down on the list, but in the grand scheme of things, it's okay. Did I tell Pandora I didn't like it, or give it a thumbs up? I went with thumbs up, so the next song it gave me was Alison, by Elvis Costello. That's kind of my BCIB for Elvis -- don't HATE it, but it's not quite my favorite EC song. The next few songs were better, but it was kind of morphing into a decent 80s station, but not quite the stuff that just makes me melt. I'm working on a Bluetones-based station, and it's similar.

I think I can type in specific songs to start off in the future, which may get me better results. This is kind of nifty -- am I just out of touch with current trends, or is this a new thing?