Pandora: A Cure For The Musical Rut

Have you ever found yourself listening to the same music over and over, wishing you had something new and good to listen to, but not knowing what's out there? Pandora.com is for you. Pandora is an internet radio service created by the Music Genome Project. You enter a band or song that you like and it will play songs that are similar in nature. As each song plays, you click a thumbs up or thumbs down to give your feedback. Pandora takes your opinions into account for future selections. When you give a song a thumbs down, it automatically moves on to playing the next song and bans the offending song from future playlists. You can also bookmark songs for later or purchase them from directly from iTunes or Amazon. Pandora will also tell you why it picked each song. For example, I entered The Fratellis as my band and one of the songs it later played was We Want More by The Living End. Pandora explained:

"Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features electric rock instrumentation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, major key tonality and many other similarities..."

I've set up separate stations for The Fratellis, Ben Folds, and Cake. So far, Pandora has been pretty much spot on. It struggles a bit trying to find songs similar to Ben Folds' style, but it has provided a significant amount of good music from just those three bands. I've been listening to the Fratellis station the most and I've noticed quite a bit of repetition, but so far it hasn't bothered me.

Another issue I've come across is that it won't let you skip through too many songs at once. Sometimes I'll try to skip a song and it will pop up a message saying:

"Unfortunately, our music licenses force us to limit the number of songs you may skip each hour. If you want to hear something else, try creating another station starting with a different artist or song."

This hasn't happened too often because Pandora is pretty good at picking songs that I like, but when it does happen, it's really annoying.

All in all, I think Pandora is pretty awesome. It isn't perfect, but it sure beats turning on a regular old radio.