Pandora: Change how you listen to music
I don’t normally post on non-technical topics, but Pandora has been such a wonderful addition to my technological experience that I felt it pertinent to share here. In case you haven’t heard of it, Pandora is a service that allows you to create and shape your own streaming radio stations. Pandora has become quite popular since its founding in 2000, now with tens of millions of listeners. I hadn’t heard much about it a year ago, and now I see people using it all the time.
To create a new station, you seed it with an artist or a song. So far I’ve run into very few songs and artists I wanted to hear that weren’t on Pandora, and I have a few… obscure tastes. Pandora will then create a station based on music similar to the one you entered and start playing it. That similarity is powered by the Music Genome Project, Pandora’s secret sauce. Technicians record characteristics about all the songs in their collection, allowing them to provide you with finely-tuned recommendations.
I didn’t have any expectations when I first tried it out, but after a week of voting suggestions up and down, I began to notice a wonderful thing. Pandora was playing songs I had never heard of, but immediately loved. I’ve discovered many new artists and songs that I would never have likely come across otherwise. In fact, I liked some of them so much that I actually started buying songs. Aside from the occasionally lucid Amazon suggestion, I’ve never encountered a service that aligned so accurately with what I like.
Pandora’s prospects are even brighter with the recent settlement of a long-standing music royalty battle. Resulting from this was the decision to cap free account usage to 40 hours a month. I listen to Pandora a lot. Nearly all day at work on my laptop, at home on my PC, and from my Blackberry Storm while in the car. As a result I hit the cap before the middle of this month. It was time to ante up, support a great thing, and get a paid account.
Enter Pandora One. It’s $36 a year, and offers a decent set of features:
- No monthly listening cap
- No ads in the web interface
- A smaller, pop-out browser interface
- Skins for customizing the appearance
- 192Kbps streaming
- A desktop application for browser-less listening
- No limit on skips
- Longer timeout
The desktop app is wonderful. It’s built on Adobe Air, so it works on all major desktop platforms. It has a small footprint, almost all the functionality of the browser interface, and looks pretty slick:
Since I’ve been using Pandora, I don’t think much about where my music is or the process of collecting new additions. Pandora can be wherever I need to go, and it will keep bringing great music to me, both new and familiar. Instead of putting any effort into the process of having and using a music collection, I can simply listen and only take any action when I like or dislike something. This has been an interesting change to explore, and I think it’s a positive one.
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July 20, 2009 - 8:01 PM
Phil Hollenback
July 28, 2009 | 4:48 PMOne thing that attracted me to last.fm instead of Pandora is the free iScrobbler plugin for last.fm. That plugin allows you to stream your last.fm music to itunes on your mac – I hate having to run another separate app to listen to music when I already know how itunes works.
So I started paying the $3/mo. to enable streaming my last.fm favorites and everything to itunes, and that worked ok, except for occasional random connection issues and streaming problems. Still, it worked well enough that I was happy.
Last week last.fm apparently changed their api, and iScrobbler no longer works to stream music from last.fm to itunes. Its not clear if anyone actually maintains iScrobbler any more.
Thus I am hoping there is another service that streams to itunes. It doesn’t seem like Pandora does that?
Samuel Huckins
August 2, 2009 | 12:00 PM@Phil I haven’t seen any way to connect Pandora and iTunes, although since I’m running Ubuntu for my desktop I admittedly haven’t been looking very much.
The problem with unifying them is that for me Pandora is a totally different experience. You aren’t listening to particular artists and songs you pick, you are forming a collection of preferences regarding your musical tastes. Using a standard desktop player like Rhythmbox or iTunes for my own collection and using Pandora are very different things, so I myself wouldn’t want them to be in the same interface.