Pandora, meaning “all gifted” in Greek, was a god who was given the gift of music. We can all be thankful that the Web site with the same name is giving us a chance to listen to music we didnít even know we liked.
Recently, I discovered this Web site that functions as a radio station, but can be highly personalized to play the specific type of music that you want to hear. You can go to http://www.pandora.com and register for free in less than two minutes.
All they need is your email, a password, your zip code to ensure that you are a U.S. resident and your gender (to allow their advertisers to target a more specific audience).
The Music Genome Project, a large team of highly trained musicians, has attempted to map the musical DNA of songs. You can create a new station by typing in an artist or song title that you enjoy. The site is very helpful by offering choices similar to what you have requested.
Pandora works by categorizing each song by just under 400 different musical attributes. These range from basic song structure to key tonality. The songs are also classified by rhythm, instrumentation, and vocals.
Once Pandora has generated a station based on your song or artist preference, the site will continue to play songs of a similar nature. Youíre allowed to skip six songs in an hour, and by clicking the thumbs down button on a song, you can ensure that a specific song is never played on that station again.
The second time you give the thumbs down to an artist, that musician is banned from the station.
Clicking thumbs up on a song tells the site to play other songs with similar musical traits. You can have up to a hundred stations on your profile. One of the coolest features is that you can select QuickMix and pick which stations to shuffle songs from.
Artists are compensated for the music played on Pandora, which means anyone can listen, guilt-free. This does mean, however, that just like a real radio station, you canít go back to a song and replay it, restart it from the beginning, or expect to hear the exact song or artist you have requested immediately on the station you create.
Unlike a radio station, Pandora allows you to pause a song and allow you to play from that point on even days later.
Pandora lets you create a brief profile where you can bookmark songs or artists that you want to remember. There’s even an option that allows you to add one of several sidebars of bookmarked songs, artists, or stations to your blog.
You can browse other listenersí profiles and store stations that they have created to your profile.
A very helpful aspect of the Web site is that it, as an “About the Music” section where you can search for songs by title, artist,
or station.
Pandora will come up with multiple options similar to what you have requested, so if you search for “One in the Afternoon” but were really looking for “Nine in the Afternoon” the site will most likely come up with the song you were looking for, plus about 50 other songs with similar titles.
This comes in handy when you can only remember a spattering of lyrics from a song you heard two months ago.
Once you find a song, you can hear a sample of it, learn who the artist is, the album, what other listeners have to say about in and the features or attributes that Pandora has ascribed to the song.
Pandora is the perfect computer D.J. for background music at a party, during a homework stretch or anytime that music is appropriate, which for music lovers like me, is all the time.