I have been looking at the Pandora Internet Radio Service http://www.pandora.com/ since yesterday, and I have to say, I have found my new obsession. I had first found out about it in a New York Times article about Internet music services that are competition to satellite radio as well as terrestrial radio, and the article mentioned Pandora. In short, my experience with the service so far hasn't been too bad, despite what the name "Pandora" suggests.
All you have to do is set up your account, which isn't very difficult as it is with signing up for other things on the 'net. Actually, that part was quick and simple. Then, all you have to do is enter and artist's name, and then you are given a selection of songs from that artist as well as similar artists. You can rate each song: If you like it, click on the thumbs up like it symbol, and if you don't, you can click on the thumbs down. When you dislike a song, the music player plays the next song on the queue for that artist's radio station. You can even enter a song title in the search to look for covers of that song or similar artists to the one who sang the song.
Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project. According to it's founder Tim Westergren, the project was started in 2000 was when musicians and music technologists listened to over 10-thousand artists and looked at each artist's musical qualities. As a result, the project has come up with hundreds of musical genres or "genes" into a Musical Genome, like the Human Genome. The Music Genome is how Pandora can find similar artists or songs. And Westergren says that the music ranges from the well-known to the obscure, and Pandora is constantly on the look-out for talent, even unknown, underground talent, which is cool because it isn't biased towards mainstream artists.
So far, Pandora has been pretty good. I have not only enjoyed listening to my favorite artists, but I have also learned about new songs from those artists. On top of that, I have learned about new artists altogether, which has been great too.
But, as with everything in life, with the good comes the bad. One negative about Pandora is that when you enter an artist or song, that artist/song may either not be on your queue, or you have to look at song after song and artist after artist until you finally what you want. Another problem is there is a limit to the number of songs you can listen to per hour because of some legality. So if, for example, you listen to a Marvin Gaye Station, and you go through your queue not liking the songs very much, then next thing you know, you can't listen to any more music until an hour has passed.
The limit of songs issue is minor because you can occupy yourself with finding more albums and songs until the hour is over, and then you can go back to that particular station and listen to more random songs, and like a radio station, you never know what you are going to get. But there are issues with the search engine, too. Pandora acts like it has such a great variety of songs, but if you are looking for foreign artists, forget it. I tried to type in some French artists, and the search engine didn't know who I was talking about. As for foreign artists, British and Canadian artists are as foreign as it gets when it comes to Pandora recognizing them. I put Shakira and Damian Marley in the search and I got stuff, so there is also luck for Latin American and reggae artists, but anything too obscure, forget it. I also have beef with the like it/don't like it. A lot of the artists that I listened to were either just okay in my book or I just didn't feel like listening to that kind of song, so I didn't want to say I didn't like the song, so most of the time I just click the fast forward button for the station to go on to the next song in the queue. I think Pandora should have a button where a song is just OK, and the symbol for it could be a hand moving like when someone says something is okay or so-so.
Besides those little snafus, I really like Pandora. It's a great way to give Internet users a say in what they like and dislike. Pandora is democracy at it's finest.
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