Cool New Music Website
Check out Pandora, a new website that features a flashed based internet radio service and a cool new way of finding new music. Unlike services like Launch or even Amazon, Pandora’s recommendations are based on attributes of the music itself (tempo, tonality, rhythm, lyrics, etc) and not on what other people with similar tastes also liked. You first create a station by seeding a song or an artist, then Pandora goes to work playing music based on the attributes of the song or artist you seed. Then you can add more artists or songs as you go along and you can also rate the songs Pandora plays by giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down to help refine the recommendations. In about a hour’s worth of playing around with the service, I’ve been pretty suprised at how many of the recommended songs I actually liked. Who knew that I would like Robbie Williams? Pandora seems much more accurate than some of the other services I’ve tried. Pandora is still in beta, so the music catalog is lacking a bit on the indie stuff. But don’t get me wrong, the catalog is already pretty big and deep. Give it a try, its completely free and doesn’t have ads while they are still in beta. They say that it will be ad-supported once they are out of beta with an option to get rid of the ads by paying for a subscription.