I suspect most will have heard about Pandora; the company was reviewed by TechCrunch, and the free release was publicized there as well. I first heard about the idea on an NPR segment about Pandora’s parent, the Music Genome Project.

I don’t know what I can add to Michael’s original review at TechCrunch, but I love this service, so here’s my non-interactive tour through the Pandora universe:

You start out at Pandora creating a new “station” by selecting an artist/group or song you like. Once you’ve created your station, Pandora starts things off by playing music by that artist (if you start with an artist)

or music similar (by their metrics) to the song you chose (if you started with a song – their licensing won’t let them play songs by request – see the FAQ). My examples are centered around a station based on Nine Inch Nails:

The next thing to do is to give the service some feedback. You can do so by clicking on the “Guide Us” button in the lower right:

or by clicking on the song-tile:

I you like the song, say so and it’ll keep playing; if you don’t like it, tell Pandora that and it’ll skip to the next song. Pandora keeps track of your responses and uses them to build the content of the station.

After the first song has played, Pandora continues with the next tune and tells you a little about why they chose it:

After that the music just plays. If you want to see why Pandora is playing a particular song, click on the song-tile and select “Why did you play this song?”:

Pandora responds with its reasoning:

As you see you can buy the album at either iTunes or Amazon, as well as add it to your personal Favorites page. I don’t use this feature much, but it gives you a page you can share with others and that allows for the same purchase options as the player – sort of a wish-list. It also links to the allmusic guide page for the band.

Of more interest are the Station options:

where you can add more music to a station to tailor it more to your liking or edit the choices you’ve made so far, like removing songs you added or said you liked or didn’t like:

All in all Pandora offers a great service – lots of good music to listen to while slaving at your keyboard, and the added bonus of discovery of new music. I’ve found some new things I really like, but the discovery comes at the potential cost of things that aren’t good at all. Unlike commercial radio, however, you can mold the selections to your liking and skip music you don’t care for. Presumably if you keep making recommendations Pandora will get better and better at matching your tastes. Hopefully they’ll be able to make a long-term go of it. The only drawback is that it takes away from my podcast listening time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2005 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Music, Technology, The 'Net .
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.