Pandora is Very Cool!
It’s not often that my wife introduces me to something very new and cool on the Internet. Tonight she emailed me about a relatively new music service called Pandora. So what is it…well from the FAQ,
Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you’ll love. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we’ll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe.
They have analyzed 300,000 songs from 10,000 artists for a multitude of characteristics (up to 400). This information allows Pandora to create a radio station based solely on the user entering a song or artist. From there, the software will play songs that meet similar characteristics. The user can give the suggestions a thumbs up or thumbs down. So how is this different from other radio station like services? This one works. The due diligence Pandora has performed in song analysis shows.
In addition, they provide a very simple, sharp flash player that works on common browsers that have flash support. Right now I’m listening from my Gentoo Linux desktop box on Firefox. I couldn’t do that with Yahoo Music Engine or ITunes. In addition, Pandora has provided links to ITunes to purchase individual songs or Amazon.com to purchase albums. So how much does this service cost? They provide a free version that is entirely supported by advertising or you can pay $36 for the year. This is one of those services I believe people will easily pay for even though it’s free. Kudos to an excellent product.