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Find great new music with Pandora

August 24, 2005 › Sandy McMurray | comment

Pandora is personal radio that learns what you like.

Give Pandora the name of a song or an artist you like and it responds with similar music. Tell Pandora when you love or hate the song that's playing, and it learns and changes your personal radio stations. If you really like a song, Pandora makes it easy to buy the track from iTunes or Amazon. (At least, that's the way it will work when the finished product launches.)

There are other music recommendation services, of course. There's last.fm, which does a good job of suggesting music you might like based on the taste of other users. That's a cool idea.

But Pandora is different. It matches the style and instrumentation of the music you suggest. If you make a personal radio station based on Bruce Hornsby, you're going to get a lot of piano music. If you make a station based on Enya, you're not likely to hear much acoustic guitar. It's not just a recommendation service along the lines of Amazon's People who bought A also bought B -- it's something else.

Pandora plans to charge US$36 per year when it officially launches, but you can preview it for free right now. Visit Pandora.com and enter your e-mail address to request an invitation to join the free preview.

You can read more about Pandora here and here and here.

Or just go here and get it!

August 24, 2005 › Sandy McMurray | comment on this item