Apparently this has been around for a while and I just didn’t know about it, but if you’re in to music and you like finding new stuff you should definitely check out Pandora Radio. Pandora Radio is an Internets radio station created by the Music Genome Project, where they’ve identified some 400 characteristics to describe music at its most basic level, and use a really complex algorithm to group songs and artists together.
The beauty of Pandora, in my limited use so far, is that you just punch in the name of a song or artist that has the kind of music you’re in the mood to listen to and it will use its magic to play songs that fit right in with that mood. So far my experience has been that its extremely accurate in the selections that it makes for you to listen to.
By creating a profile for free, Pandora will also remember the stations you’ve created based on your song or artist searches so that you can cue a past request right up when you get back to the page. I don’t know how many different stations you can have. I only have three at this point, but I would have to assume that it would be quite a few more than that.
There are a couple of limitations in functionality that people will probably dislike, but they’re understandable given licensing rules Pandora has to deal with from the the publishing companies. You can’t hear any song you want at any time. You do get a limited number of song skips per hour and you can sample pretty much everything they have, but you don’t get on demand songs. The record companies just won’t let that happen. So if you want to hear a specific song immediately, try your luck at YouTube.
My only other complaint that I have at this point is that some of the technical stuff doesn’t seem to want to play nice with Chrome. Some of the layout/CSS stuff doesn’t seem to want to agree with Chrome. Also, you have the ability to get more information about whatever artist is playing at the moment or additional information about the song your listening to. The problem comes in that the site provides this information in a pop-up, which Chrome blocks everytime, forcing me go through my pop-up blocker to get to the additional information I want to read. Not a huge deal, but kind of annoying.
Like I said before, if you’re looking to hear a specific song right away, this isn’t the place for you, but if you want to listen to the kind of music you want to hear, and maybe find a new artist or two along the way, Pandora is a great place to do that. Without a doubt, its an improvement on crappy radio stations that play the same songs over and over and make you sit through commercials all the time.
