Pandora

As you may know, I am a cubicle dweller. I am chained to my desk for many hours a day. Fortunately a co-worker let me know about Pandora. It is a really amazing internet radio service, totally free.

I know that there are other internet radio sites, but I really like this one. Most sites have you pick a genre of music and then start sending in random selections of that type of music.

Pandora does it differently. You start out by entering one of your favorite groups, or a song you like. The software then does its magic and starts playing 'similar' songs. They are using the Music Genome Project database that is an attempt to categorize each song by unique characteristics. This is how they describe it.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

It may be that I just really like the tech behind this service, but it does deliver long strings of songs that I really like.

Once you have the basic station set up, you can then add additional groups and songs to the station definition. Also as songs play, you can tell Pandora that you like a song or dislike a song with their thumbs-up or down buttons. As you do these things, you further fine-tune the station down to exactly what you like.

You can also set up many stations. So if the mood hits you to listen to "music like KISS", go to town. Then you can open up that Carpenters/Beach Boys station to mellow out afterwards!

The only downside for me is that they only let you skip so many songs per hour. But, you can skip approx. 6 songs each hour, so that's 6 more than the radio. They have also started playing ads- maybe one 10 second ad per hour. Better than the radio? You decide.

You might think that a big negative is that you have to stay chained to your desk to listen. Well, actually, I have a Pandora client for my smartphone! It has access to all the stations that I created at my desk and I can plug it into my aux-in jack in my jeep and rock out.

You can, of course, also play it out of you home PC if your speakers aren't too tinny.