I'm OK, how are you?" Thom Yorke asks as buzzing guitars whizz by like low-flying aircraft.

Well, Thom, things seem to be getting a little better, and your driving, cinematic B-side "Palo Alto" from the "Airbag/How Am I Driving" EP has something to do with it.

I'm listening to the song on Pandora.com, a new "music discovery service" that's given the traditional music industry gatekeepers yet another shove toward irrelevance (ah, looking forward to that day in the near future when all those pay-for-play terrestrial radio stations are turned into bomb shelters and major label marketing departments no long have the industry in a headlock).

Pandora helps the cause by offering up 400,000 songs from more than 20,000 artists -- from big to small, popular to obscure -- and focusing on levelling the playing field between them all. The site began as an off-shoot of the Music Genome Project, an ongoing, six-year study that breaks down various songs on a variety of characteristics, or "genes."

Here's how it works: You log onto the site and do a search for a band (or a song) that you dig, and in addition to selections from that artist, the station picks tunes with similar characteristics to play.

Songs are analyzed on up to 400 musical attributes -- from tonality to recording style. By assembling songlists this way, many traditional category distinctions fall by the way side, resulting in a much broader array of music presented and some interesting, unlikely matches.

Moreover, underground artists are treated the same as established acts, meaning there's a nice blend of household names and bands that you've probably never heard of.

During the Radiohead stream, the group was paired with the jangly power pop of Fairmount, the indie ruminations of Steadman and the breezy whir of Occam's Razor -- bands that you'd be unlikely to get exposed to in any other setting.

And there's plenty of groups to discover -- you can have up to 10 different custom stations at a time. If you don't like a song or artist that the site plays, you can ban them from your station. If you do dig a tune, you can add the song or the artist to your playlist. Every time you do so, you broaden the pool of music available to you (each song added pulls 100 new tunes into rotation).

The site is free to use -- though you can subscribe to a version of Pandora without pop-up ads for $36 a year. You can't replay a song because of licensing restrictions, but you can skip forward among tracks six times per hour on each station.

Pandora's best feature? The way in which it puts underground bands such as the Time Flys, Mortal Decay and 400 Blows on the same footing as superstars such as Pearl Jam and Madonna.

"I want equality!" the lead singer of the Narcoleptic Youth screams on my New Bomb Turks channel.

Consider it done, dude.

Jason Bracelin's column appears on Tuesdays. Reach him at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com