Pandora is a gift from the music gods of the internet. Imagine a radio station that played your favorite artist and gave you the option to listen to other artists with similar musical styles. That is Pandora in a nutshell, not a music player, not a radio station, more like your best friend.
The theory is that the creators of the Music Genome Project look at music and create a "genetic profile" that describes the music according to it's melody, harmony and rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement and lyrics.
There is a timelessness about it rather than selecting artists based on age or time things were recorded. For example a station based around Katie Melua will also play James Taylor, James Blunt, Holly Brook, Norah Jones, Helen Reddy and Missy Higgins. So the choice covers artists from different countries as well as different ages - at one point it even played Nana Mouskouri.
To make it work well you need a broadband connection and you do have the ability to skip up to six tracks in an hour with the further option to say NO to anything you really don't like. You can give a vote to your most liked and disliked songs and it will build those into the player's algorithm to make it more accurately reflect your musical tastes. I have to admit it is way easier than keeping play lists, it is ad free and therefore runs probably 75% of the time in the office. The feedback you give it also affects other who have set up similar stations so Pandora learns as she plays and develops a sort of sentient taste for different genres of music.
Pandora can be found at Pandora and takes only a couple of minutes to set up and as learning process, gets better the more you listen to it. The song database is coupled to both an album cover database and has links to both iTunes and Amazon to enable you to purchase music through the program. Hopefully the launch of Zune will encourage them to expand beyond only iPod support as the iTunes license model is somewhat limiting to how you use the music you paid for. By the way Comingzune, no one knows (or at least can't tell you) but it could be the end of the iPod generation.
