Pandora: a great resource for new music

I’ve been listening to streaming radio lately and have found myself addicted to Pandora.com.  Pandora is a new type of radio that was founded by the Music Genome Project.  What happens is you create what is called a radio station.  You start the radio station with a seed, either an artist name or a song title.  That’s it, Pandora will then sort through it’s extensive database of analyzed music to find songs that match the qualities of the artist or song you specified.  This could be anywhere from keys, time signatures, type of singer, type of instruments used, etc… For me, I started a station with Tommy Emmanuel and Bruce Cockburn as the seeds.  I then got tons of music of solo acoustic guitar with some vocals.  If you like a song, you can give it a thumbs up and you will hear more like it.  If you don’t like the song, a thumbs down will restrict similar music from your station.  You will definately use this because there will be songs that you hear that you wonder “why the heck is this playing.”

What is nice about this station is that I have been exposed to music that I didn’t know was around.  It has definitely broadened my musical knowledge.  My first criticism of pandora was that I can’t create a station based on a genre.  They do have some “presets” that you can use that sort by Rock, Soul, Jazz, Holiday, etc… but not even close to enough. For example, I love musicals but they don’t have a category for them and I have yet to find very many in that genre.  I hope they expand.

 I encourage you to check it out and let me know what you think and if you have an special tips that I can use to better use pandora, that would be great.