If you love music a service called Pandora will astound you!
The Pandora site presents a Flash movie (which works on Windows and Mac) that allows you to create a “station” — you enter an artist or a sng name and Pandora creates a stream of tracks that are related to whatever song or artist you started with and plays them for you. The service’s underlying music analysis engine has analyzed and created profiles of all the music they store (the system currently covers some 400,000 tracks). Subsequent selections by the Pandora system are related to the profile of the music you start with modified by your feedback. When a song is playing you can click on it and create a new station based on that track, indicate that you like or don’t like it, buy the track from iTunes or the album from Amazon, or add the track to your Pandora favorites page. You can even create RSS feeds for your favorites and a panel of your stations to be incorporated into your blog or Web page. Voila! Instant, personalized, and relevant music programming! You can register for free and create up to 100 channels. Log in to your Pandora account on any PC and you’ll get your list of channels, favorites list, and so on. The only limitation is that you can’t listen to the same channel stream on multiple machines simultaneously. If you pay ($36 annually or $12 quarterly) then the user interface will not display the included (and curiously not at all irritating) advertising. This service is a work of genius! Pandora’s been around since its launch last November and has become perhaps the most impressive entrant into the on-line consumer music market in terms of its potential impact on how music is discovered and subsequently purchased. The music industry needs to pay close attention to what these guys are doing because this is the way to get music lovers excited, help them find more artists they like, and get them to purchase. Outstanding! Now, if the music industry could just get to grips with realistic per track pricing ($0.99 per track is still way too much) …
