I :heart: Pandora.  Not the chick with the box but the internet radio station.  I haven’t listened to radio in years for music because my tastes were far from the mainstream, and I had no interest in tuning in to a station at a specific time just to listen to music when I could just play my own.  But lately I was kinda bored with all of my music.  So I decided to give Pandora a try.

Pandora is described as a music discovery service based on the Music Genome Project, where peeps try classifying songs based on their qualities.  It’s like Amazon’s recommendation action with a brain – instead of making a recommendation based on consumption patterns, it makes a recommendation based on shared musical aspects.  Like a slow moving bassline, rap influences and use of violin.

This is how it works – you create an account, and then you can create stations.  Stations start with an artist or a song (though they will not play the exact song immediately – apparently requests are a no-no).  These are called seeds.  Whenever a song is played, you can just listen to it, give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  The more thumbs you give, the more personalized the station gets. That’s all there is to it.  If you give an artist 2 thumbs down on a station, they’re banned.  If you don’t want to ban someone, you can temporarily ban a song for a month.  I love this stuff – new music is engaging me and I’m bookmarking cool songs & artists (with convenient links to Amazon & iTunes so the Pandora peeps can make some $).

My favorite station right now is one I made consisting of dub and 80s-ish hip hop.  I started the station with DJ Vadim, added King Tubby, then Rae & Christian (based on some tracks they played that I liked), Horace Andy, Mad Professor and Gotan Project (not sure about whether I dig the last one’s influence in the station).  I’ve also added stations for rockabilly/psychobilly, irish folk & idm/chillout with good results.  Actually, I was surprised with how good the rock & folk stations turned out to be, and found some good new (to me) music to boot (though I was unimpressed that I couldn’t add Pete Seeger to give my folk station more flavor).

Pandora worked with Christmas music too – I started off with a swingin’ Christmas station, gave a thumbs down to modern crapmeisters like Harry Connick Jr & Diana Krall in favor of Ella, Louie, Sinatra and the like, and added Elvis and VOILA.  Instant Arp Christmas music.

Now this is all web-based, so it’s great for work or if you have some nice speakers hooked up to the home ‘puter.  They have started offering it on mobile phones too, which is pretty cool.  Overall, I totally recommend checking & trying it out.  I for one have started a nice list of new music & artists to shake me out of my 10 year old musical doldrums.