I heard about an Internet radio station called Pandora from Inside the Net. For those that don’t know, Internet radio is a website that plays music on your computer like a radio. It can consume a lot of bandwidth so I think you’ll need a fast internet connection. For comparison, a modem runs about about 56 kbps and a song plays at about 96-128 kbps. Normally, I wouldn’t care about Internet radio. It sounds rather foolish, why waste my bandwidth on a song that plays over and over when I could just buy and download it once. Pandora is different in that they use the Music Genome Project to classify songs. It takes about 20 minutes to classify each song and there are many different parameters. When you tell them what songs or artists you want to hear it will look for related songs. Some from popular sources and some from unknown or small bands. The website is free (ad based) or subscription based. Subscription is $36/yr or $12/quarter.
So, how is it?
I’ve been “programming” it for a couple of days. There are a lot of songs that are the only one I like from a band. It’s taking me a little while to tune it. Sometimes it finds songs that I would have added myself. That seems to indicate that it’s working. The interface is a Flash player. It works extremely well. You can have multiple radio stations for your moods and you can add songs or artists. As songs play you give them either a thumbs up or thumbs down to tune it. Signing up was very easy. It’s pretty much just the one web page with the Flash based music player on it. Overall, I like it. Since, I don’t like taking up my bandwidth for it I use it to find songs and then buy them. I’ll see how much it sticks with me.
My ideal would be to submit a playlist from Windows Mediaplayer or WinAmp and let them use that as a basis, instead of typing everything in. And then buying playlists from them or as a front end to purchase songs. Everything would have to be ultra cheap (compared to iTunes) around 10-20 cents per song and playlists at $3-$5.
