Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Internet Music -- Pandora

Thanks to The Bestest Blog site, I found a cool music site called Pandora. In brief, the site is an internet radio station that you create and influence. You set up a station's playlist by adding your favorite artists to a primary list. Pandora plays songs from those artists as well as artists related to those on your primary list. In that way you are introduced to new artists that you may not have heard before. It’s another way to discover some new music.

The relations between artists/groups have been defined through a music genome effort. You can also rate songs as they are played and your ratings guide the system to choose music more suited to your taste. I thought it worked pretty well, but I did notice few limitations. First, that rating system is a simple like or dislike. It would be nice to have a five or ten point scale. Second, if you get a really bad song you have the option to skip over it. However, you can only skip a certain number of songs per hour. Finally, it's a US only service right now.

Check it out.

1 comment:

Rico said...

Pandora is a great site. However it does work for me, and I'm in Canada. All you need to do is provide a hotmail address and you're in. You also might want to check out Pandora's Jar, which allows you to save the music to your hard drive if you like.