Pandora: tailor-made tunes
Pandora isn’t exactly new. That being said, I finally started using it this past week and I have to say I’m very impressed. For the uninitiated Pandora is basically an adaptive internet radio station which is marketed as radio which plays only the music you like. That’s true enough, but Pandora becomes very valuable in helping you find new music as well. So what exactly sets Pandora apart when compared to other radio stations either online or off?
When you first start listening to Pandora you’ll be asked to submit an artist or song that you like. Then, based on certain characteristics your song or artist has, Pandora will start pulling in music that is similar to it from various artists. From there you can either give the song a thumbs up if you like it or a thumbs down if you don’t. This helps Pandora to further understand your musical interests so that future songs will be better tailored to your taste. So far this has worked remarkably well. Though at the beginning maybe 6/10 songs Pandora played were ones I liked, now it’s at least 9/10. Very rarely do I give a thumbs down to a song after only a few days of use.
My only gripe about the process of rating songs so far is that I get a decent amount of music I’ve already heard and I’m always compelled to immediately give them a good rating. At the same time my favorite part about Pandora is listening to artists I haven’t heard of before and broadening my horizons a bit. Really what it comes down to is I prefer hearing music I’ve never heard before over hearing some songs I’ve heard a bunch but that’s a minor complaint. Not only that but it’s easily solvable – next to the rating for each song you can also tell Pandora that you’re tired of a song so it won’t be played for the next 30 days. I’m starting to do that a little more often since there’s a lot of songs that I like but have heard a lot and get a little tired of.
So for example, with my first station I decided to use the artist Flogging Molly. Pandora went ahead and pulled in a bunch of similar music, some of which I’d heard and a lot of which I haven’t. I’m also a fan of The Dropkick Murphys and The Pogues, two bands that are pretty similar to Flogging Molly. As a result music from all three of those bands comes up pretty regularly, and I tend to give them all the thumbs up. So really I have every song from Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys and The Pogues set as positives. That’s great but I was thinking about it and, although all of their music is similar, there are a bunch of different themes found in all of it. For example Flogging Molly tends to vary their instruments from more traditional (tin whistle, bag pipes, violin) to contemporary (electric guitar in particular). So then, because I’m giving all of their songs a positive rating does Pandora think I like all music that has guitars in it? Or all music just because it uses traditional instruments? That’s a little logistical but so far it hasn’t seemed to have been a problem.
Another nice thing about Pandora is that you can create more than one station. My Flogging Molly station is tailored quite well to Irish folk music of various styles, but what happens if I’m in the mood for some rap? I could create a new station and put Nas in as the artist. Or maybe I want to listen to something a little heavier? I could create a Deftones station. All of my stations are saved so whenever I get the urge to listen to one type of music or another I can just choose my station and go. In order to have your stations saved and to get the full benefit of the service you have to sign up, but it’s all free so there’s no worries there. In fact if you don’t sign up I think you only get a certain number of songs as a trial, and then if you want to continue you have to sign up.
Pandora also has an Adobe Air client so you don’t have to always have a dedicated Pandora tab in your favorite web browser. The Air application isn’t the prettiest thing I’ve seen, it seems almost like a windowed version of their website, but you get some easy access to functions associated with the service by right-clicking the application’s icon which is nice. It’s so nice that I haven’t really even used Pandora from the site yet, so I guess that says something. Go ahead and give Pandora a look if you’re a fan of music, and really, who isn’t? =P
Now Playing:
The Dropkick Murphys – The Wild Rover
Metal Gear Solid 4
