Thing 6: Pandora Radio Gets Free Advertising

I'm so pleased that Pandora got a "best of Web 2.0" award. I love Pandora, and have been recommending it to people for at least a year.

Here's how Pandora Radio works:

1. Create an account. This is the Web 2.0 component, as far as I can tell.
2. Enter the name of a song or an artist you like.
3. Pandora then harnesses the awesome power of the Music Genome Project to identify the key characteristics of that song or artist and creates a random playlist of other songs that it thinks you will like. It saves these characteristics as a "station," which you can name whatever you want (my main two are "Ska-tastic" and "Awesome Metal!")
4. As you listen, you can fine-tune your station by telling Pandora you like a particular song, in which case it will adjust the "seeds" for your station, or you don't like a song, in which case it will never play it again on that station. You can also "shelve" a song for month if you're tired of it or ban artists from a station entirely.

I've only rarely seen Pandora get it wrong and play something I don't like, and that's usually when I'm listening to something reasonably mainstream (i.e. generic) or difficult to pin down (e.g. They Might Be Giants or Phish).

As you listen, you can also click varous parts of the UI (that's User Interface) to get more information such as artist bios, album reviews, and even links to buy song or albums through iTunes or Amazon. You can also share your stations with friends if they also have an account.

Recently, Pandora instituted a "pay to listen" policy, but it's not that bad. Every user can listen to 40 hours/month for free. After that, it costs $0.99 to listen as much as you want for the rest of the month.

Anyway, I don't see that there'd be much use for Pandora academically, except maybe in a Music class, to play with identifying types of music people might not be exposed to otherwise. But as a personal music tool, I've been a fan for a long time, and will recommend it to anyone.