Free Music Inside Pandora's Box

Visit Pandora's website and you will immediately have access to a stream of songs that are similar in musical quality to the song or band name that you type in its search engine. Once this station is created, you can add up to 100 stations of streaming music. And better yet, no software installation is needed since Pandora works through your existing browser.

Pandora was crafted seven years ago by the pioneers of the "Music Genome Project". This project involved a team of fifty musician-analysts that spent hours unraveling the "DNA" of up to six decades worth of songs. These songs were organized and grouped according to over 400 musical qualities including its vocals, melody, harmony and lyrics. Once organized, Pandora's search engine quickly identifies which songs have similar musical qualities to the one you requested. This analysis continues daily in order to keep up with the constant flow of new music being released.

The name for this project was chosen based on ancient Greek mythology. Pandora, whose name means "gifted", was the first woman to be created and was also extremely curious. Eventually her curiosity led her to open a container that unleashed envy, slander, greed and other vile things unto the human race. The founder of Pandora wanted to celebrate her curiosity instead of condemning it and hoped to inspire similar musical inquisitiveness among its listeners.

Pandora gives you the option to choose which songs you like or dislike on your stations by offering a thumbs up or thumbs down feature. If you give certain songs thumbs down, then songs with comparable musical properties won't be played on that station again. However, if you give the song a thumbs up, it will add similar songs to that station.

There are two memberships you can choose from, a free one that features advertisement on its home page, and a paid membership. The yearly fee of $36 just ensures that you don't have to look at advertisements since there are no other additional benefits.

The only disadvantages to Pandora are that listeners can't skip more than six songs per hour on each station no matter which membership you have. You also can't rewind or replay a song due to the company's strict music licenses.

However its advantages are numerous, since you can listen to the music on more than one computer, and allow Pandora to do a "Quick Mix" of your favorite music stations to ensure a variety of music.