Pandora

Posted on 30. May, 2009 by Rob in Tech

Long gone are my days of mix-tapes and road trips.  I will forever have a special place in my heart when it comes to the mighty cassette tape and all the fantastic blends of road music I created over the years.  I used to have a massive appetite for new music.  Many bands were discovered through friends, concerts, and sampling of other people’s mix-tapes.  I have found over the years it is harder and harder to discover music in that same fun way.  Most radio stations play genres I don’t care for and friends are now too busy to recommend new bands.

Imagine a radio station that plays only the music you like.  Imagine it learns from your habits and starts offering songs so similar to your taste you’re almost guaranteed to like as well.  Imagine an infinite mix-tape filled with nostalgia and discovery…

Pandora is your new mix-tape.

Pandora has created the Music Genome Project, which does exactly what you need to discover music in that fun way again.  As like other streaming radio, you can access your stations via the website and create new ones to further tailor your experience.  Once new stations are created you can edit them by changing their name, description, add artists, and even seed songs.  As you listen to your stations you can click when you like or dislike a song and the station will learn over time.  I found this was rarely necessary though as the songs offered up were phenomenal right away.  While Pandora doesn’t have quite the library of some other services, the songs it does have are perfect for my tastes.  I found most songs that showed up on my stations were exactly the style I wanted when I chose the settings.  There were countless, “Oh yeah, I forgot about this song.  Awesome!”, moments as new songs and artists popped up.

Discovery is a big part of Pandora’s service as well.  When you create a station you can choose which artists set the tone of the station and Pandora goes to work picking other songs and artists that have similar style.  I’m not sure how Pandora’s “brain” works but it was able to select songs that not only fit but complimented my artists every time.  There were a few times it decided to go on a tangent (picking several spanish songs in a row when one of my seed songs had spanish), but a quick reset of the station always got it going again.  I’ve discovered more new musicians through Pandora in a month than I have any other medium all year.

PandoraOne is their new premium service which makes the experience even better!  For only $36 a year you get some added bonuses.

No ads (visual or audio)
High quality streaming (192K)
Desktop application (works on Mac and Windows)
Extended listening (5 hours in a row with no interaction)
Unlimited skips (still only 6 per hour per station, but unlimited across multiple stations)

The only complaint I have about Pandora is about their mobile streaming client.  While it works great on both BlackBerry and iPhone, the quality is horrible with only mono audio.  Until they fix this, Slacker Radio is the much better mobile choice.

Check out Pandora today and I highly recommend getting PandoraOne.  The sound quality is amazing and it can easily turn your house into an unlimited mix-tape.

You can listen to some of my stations as well.  See the sidebar of my blog for links.