Pandora Radio

I have always had a short attention span, and am quickly realizing that my attention span for listening to music from my iTunes collection and my iPod typically gets old. Being “old”, I’m not quite in on the college scene, and typically don’t follow the music trends too well, so I find myself not being introduced to new music. A friend recommended Pandora Radio. All I can say is that I’m hooked.

Pandora Radio is built on such a great concept. You enter the name of a song or artist that you like, and it sends that information back to it’s computer brain – which builds a playlist of songs that have similar musical elements to the songs that you indicated that you liked to begin with. This seems to work ok.

Where it gets interesting and addictive, is that when these new songs play, you are given controls to say whether or not you like a song. If you like it, it gets the thumbs up icon, and keeps playing. If you don’t like it, it gets the thumbs down, and is skipped. So during your listening, the Pandora brain just keeps figuring out the type of music and artists that you like to listen to. After about a month, I’m finding that almost every thing that gets played, I like.

I started using this to find new music, but I was pleasantly suprised to start hearing songs and artists that I had forgotten about. As they came up, I added them to my channel, and every day I’m finding new and interesting music, completely personalized just for me.

If only I had an iPod with a permanent internet connection. I’d be in musical heaven.