I’d heard about Pandora few times, and recall trying it out a few years ago. I finally decided to register an account and try it out on a more extended basis. So far, I’m liking what I’m hearing. What exactly is Pandora, and why do I recommend it? Read on!

Pandora is an internet-based streaming radio service, where you can customize your playlist depending on your musical preferences. To use an example, let’s say you like to listen to Jean-Luc Ponty, as I do. You create a new station in Pandora. What it does is play your artist, along with other musicians or bands that fit similar style descriptions. When I first entered Jean-Luc Ponty, it played a sample of “Two Thousand-One Years Ago” from Life Enigma, his CD from 2001. The song immediately following it was Daryl Stuermer’s “Meltdown” from his new CD Go!, which I liked enough to put on my Amazon wish list. Following that were songs by Rippingtons, Noel Pointer (another electric violinist), Ponty’s “Rhythms of Hope”, Tangerine Dream, Speedy J and an electronica artist Kaito. Another Daryl Stuermer track from Go! (”Masala Mantra”) is playing as I type this.

Your new station would, in this case, be called “Jean-Luc Ponty Radio.”  If you don’t like a selection in your channel, you click on the “thumbs down” icon, and it will never be played again.  It also seems that if the musical style is different, it will also weed out songs that are similar to it.  There is also a “thumbs up” icon to indicate you really like a song, and you can also save songs to bookmarks.  Album art, album title, song title and artist are shown for each selection.  Sound quality is very good, especially considering the bitstream is delivered at only 128kbps.  You will need the Flash player installed in your browser to use the service.

Pandora is the product of the Music Genome Project, where trained musicians assign anywhere from 150 to 500 “genes” to each artist, with each gene being rated 1 to 5 based on the content of the song in question.  Then, mathematical functions determine vector of the songs you like, and compares them to other songs within a certain “distance” (mathematically) to choose similar songs that you’ll probably like. Based on my experience, the theory behind this technology works very well.  And the more ratings you give the songs yourself, the better you can train your station to play songs you are interested in hearing.

Pandora is free, for the streaming service to your computer.  But, if you want to use your stream with devices like the Squeezebox, you can pay the $36/year subscription and gain that ability.   $36 isn’t that much–that works out to the cost of three CDs over the course of a year.  Given the quality of the playlists thus far, I would not hesitate to pay that amount.

Pandora gets high marks for its “intelligence” in choosing songs that match your listening habits.  Give it a try–you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how well it works!  And since you can create multiple channels, you can create a new one for any mood you happen to be in.  Highly recommended!