Go ahead, open the box

Oh my. I have a new toy. Pandora is simply the greatest tool for discovering new music, ever. Sure, iTunes is great once you know what you want to buy, but you have to already know what you’re looking for. And those college networks we all “borrowed” mp3s from a few years ago? You either got stuff you already liked or it was a total crapshoot. But oh, Pandora… Pandora is different. You type in a song you like and Pandora’s computers dissect its musical DNA and construct a playlist composed of similar music. You don’t get to choose what you listen to directly – Pandora doesn’t *play* the song you input; it merely finds songs with similar qualities and streams them for you. As the website says: ”It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.”

I’ve played with it for several hours and have yet to come across a song I didn’t like. There are no commercials, it’s totally free, you do not have to download any special software to run it, and it offers a direct link to buy any song you hear off iTunes.

It’s just fantastic.

This entry topic comes courtesy frequent commentor Brian who in turn got it from a couple of his friends. There’s not a whole lot of overlap between readers, though, and as Brian said, “given how cool Pandora is, I had to post about it myself”

Tags: entertainment technology