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You’ve got to be pretty confident about your product when you give it a name like “Genius.” But after spending the day with Genius, I see that Apple’s confidence in its music recommendation service is completely justified.

Genius helps listeners find music they would like, based on a current music selection, their previous purchases, and the purchases of every iTunes customer who participates. Genius works in two ways: first, it generates playlists from your library. Second, it recommends music that Apple thinks “goes with” your current selection. It’s available for iTunes 8 on your computer, as well as the latest iPod classic, iPod touch, 4th gen iPod nano, and part of the iPhone 2.1 software set to drop on Friday.

As my example, I used Broken by UNKLE (from the soundtrack of X-Files: I Want to Believe). The song, my current favorite, is a combination of rock and trip-hop.

From my own library, Genius pulled songs including Where You End by Moby; Avalon by Juliet; Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat. I think these were excellent choices.

In fact, Genius also selected Lonely by Your Side by Azzido da Bass & Johnny Blake, an iTunes freebie that was buried within my 5000+ song library, which I had forgotten I owned.

And astonishingly, Genius pulled up Stoned in Love by Chicane, a song I downloaded from iTunes UK, isn’t available in the US, and which I’m not authorized to play on my iTunes account. The anonymity Apple promised is working. Color me impressed.

Then I refreshed the list. I didn’t like the second choices Genius made, but alas, I couldn’t find a way to retrieve the first playlist. I hope a Genius 2.0 rectifies this problem.

From iTunes, Genius pulled up songs with startling speed, as if it were anticipating my selection. iTunes offered to complete my X-Files soundtrack. It also suggested a popular UNKLE album, plus UNKLE’s top five songs. Genius also recommended one album and fourteen songs from a mixture of artists. As for the songs, I wasn’t inspired to purchase any of them, but I enjoyed the range of new music I was exposed to. However, the album is decidedly not to my taste.

Unfortunately there’s no way to tell Genius if I liked its selection or not, but if it lives up to its name it will fix this problem.  Another reason why iTunes is only 95% successful: although iTunes recommends music based on my library, it doesn’t take into account songs I don’t like nearly as much. I’m suddenly motivated to rate my songs.

Maybe 94%. It took a half hour to upload my 5,000+ song library.

But the problems were minor compared to Genius' utter ease of use and the sheer delight I received from exploring new, yet familiar music.

Apple may be late to the recommendation game, but the company has an advantage as world’s most popular online music store: it has a massive amount of data to work from. Genius can’t help but be the #1 music recommendation service. But it just might be the best too.