Cool Website: Pandora Internet Radio

Have you ever been in a situation where you got tired of all the music that you had on your computer? It seems hard to believe, but even with the huge amounts of music some people have stored on their disks, they can get tired of the same old music very quickly. Of course, this presents a problem. How can you expect to find new music easily? It’s not as if there is just a website that will look at your music preferences and give you a list of songs, is it?

In fact, there is. Pandora Internet Radio is an amazing tool that has been around for some time now. Though the service is now restricted to people living in the United States only due to raised royalty fees, everyone can still enjoy the music recommendation program provided by the Music Genome Project; American users just have the added advantage of the Pandora music player.

The premise is simple. You enter a song or artist you want to listen to similar music to, and then the player will give you similar songs or artists. The more artists you rate via a Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down system, the more accurate the player gets. After some time on the player, it gets amazingly good at predicting what music you want to hear.

In addition, the player provides you with multiple radio stations. You can have a separate station for rock, jazz, or even classical. Unfortunately, the player does have several limitations - for example, it is not a music on-demand service - it will only play similar songs, not a specific song on-demand. In addition, you can only skip six songs per hour - any more than that and it doesn’t let you skip songs anymore. However, after the settings adjust to the music you like, that no longer becomes much of a drawback as you will only very rarely find yourself skipping songs.

In addition, there are Pandora players out there that you can download and use from your desktop outside of the browser window. I am currently trying out OpenPandora, which has some pretty useful features on it in addition to the ones that are standard to Pandora.

Even if you aren’t in the United States, the service does provide the Backstage options - you can find out about different artists and songs similar to your tastes even outside of the US.

This service may sound kind of silly but trust me, it works.