A few friends had mentioned Pandora to me a long time ago, but I had never followed up with a visit to the site until a few months ago. Pandora is a cross between an internet radio station and a music recommendation service. You enter an artist or song that you like, and it plays similar music for you. You can then rate (thumbs up or down) songs as they play to refine the music it plays for you. Different sets of music can be created by separating your preferences into different 'stations.' The flash-based interface works in most browsers and is very easy to use. The service is ad-supported, but you can pay a fee to have the ads removed.
I listen to mostly American rock music from the past 50 years, and Pandora has a pretty solid selection of tracks to choose from in that regard. It has a tendency to replay tracks or artists over a long period of time, but you can skip several songs an hour to work around that. You can also block specific songs and artists from being played for a month which can eliminate that problem all together. Overall I've found the site a nice change of pace compared to my normal listening habits, since it takes effort to make a decent playlist. Parker and others pointed out that the Genius feature of the newest version of ITunes does a similar thing using your own music.
So if you are tired of queuing up your own music, have trouble picking what you want to listen to like I do, and get tired of the radio, try Pandora. Just go to the site and type in one artist or song and it'll start playing music.
Posted by ramk at January 20, 2009 10:59 PMPandora is amazing, if you're in the US. I tried it in Britian, they put up a message reporting copyright problems. Still, the song selector is smarter than most radio DJs. It's introduced me to several new artists already!
You should post about hulu, fancast, etc etc...
Posted by: jackson at January 22, 2009 12:41 AM