Pandora - Streaming for Music Lovers
I recently ran across an interesting music service called Pandora. Unlike other services like Shoutcast or AOL/XM (which I access through Winamp) YOU can actually pick songs or artists you want to hear. Pandora then does something amazing……it picks other songs you might like to hear and, strangely enough, more often than not it succeeds! Pandora has two service levels - free (ad supported) or paid (with no ads). The free service only puts ads on the web page of the flash-based player, which can be separated into it’s own window. The paid non-ad service is $36 for the year or $12 for a quarter. Not bad, considering the customization level. You can also buy a handy device with Pandora built-in!
The customization is what keeps me coming back to their service for music. The first station I set up was based on Steely Dan’s Aja album. I soon discovered that adding artists could be problematic, especially when they’ve been around as long as Donald Fagen and Walter Beck have! My station was serving up lots of classic rock. In my not-so-humble opinion, the Grateful Dead shouldn’t be on the same station as Deacon Blues. I wanted jazz fusion! After digging around awhile I determined that it was better to add just specific songs. I threw in some Michael Franks tunes and soon I had a nice quirky jazz station going. Not smooth jazz exactly (too many vocals), not rock, just good stuff. MY stuff. Then Pandora surprised me a bit by throwing in some songs I would absolutely NEVER have found on my own. And that’s where the genius of the Music Genome Project began to shine.
These guys have broken music down in to so many parts it’s not even funny. 200 categories for most pop tunes, almost 400 for latin, hip-hop, electronica and jazz! This is both good and bad. Many times the songs Pandora picks for you don’t seem to have any relationship to what you want to hear. The more customizable something is, the more complicated it is, and Pandora is no exception. But when they play a song that isn’t what you had in mind, you can simply give it a ‘thumb’s down’ and your station takes that into account for future song selections! You can also give a thumb’s up. Pandora tracks what you like and what you don’t. I’ve discovered some amazing new artists this way! Theresa Sokyrka, Big Fuzz, John Pizzarelli, and the Rustic Overtones. I’ve also run across several songs that never made any airplay (at least not on any station I ever heard) but that are great! Keith Richards doing soulful ballads? Edgar Winter doing a Michael Franks impersonation with a nice jazz number? Oh, and over on my Funk Channel, I was going for a thumb’s up on one particular tune only to discover that it was (shriek!) Donny Osmond!!!
On top of all this, you can search through their massive database by artists or song and most artists have rather detailed histories. It all reminds me of the summer of ‘73. That’s the year I moved from a small town in West Texas (the epitome of ‘BFE’) to the ‘big city’ of Fort Worth. I thumbed through the dial on my small transistor radio in amazement. I listened to Michael Franks, Grand Funk and the Isley Brothers with equal relish. I’ve always been one to appreciate all types of music (except for most Country & Western tunes) so Pandora is just my type of music product. Check it out!
[eminimall]