My Love for Pandora Radio

Pandora Radio was launched a few years ago yet it continues to grow, averaging about 1 million to 2 million visitors per day. What is it all about? Pandora Radio is essentially an online internet radio service that is run through a Web site. You start by choosing an artist or song you enjoy, and the station will play anything that it deems similar to that artist or song. You can then choose to thumb up or thumb down these songs, which affects the frequency of which they are played on the station.

So how can a computer choose similar artists and songs? Well it is all possible because of the Music Genome Project. Songs are all tagged with a different style of music, we know these as genres. Well, there are also 100s of subgenres that most people don't even know about. This project takes all of the tags and uses a mathematical algorithm to organize them all.

This Music Genome Project is what Pandora Radio uses to make your radio station. I was a bit skeptical when I first heard about this because I thought I would get really mediocre music that I could hear if I turned on my radio. This was not the case. Pandora Radio has a huge database of music that keeps impressing me day after day, and keeps your stations from getting stale like those old cheese curls in the corner of your room.

I am definitely a little bit of a music snob when it comes to new bands yet Pandora Radio is where I get the low down on a lot of this stuff. So what does this cost?

Pandora Radio is absolutely free! Well, pretty much. Once you've totaled 40 hours of listening to music in one month, you will need to pay $0.99 to continue using the service. I'm not sure if they have always had this $0.99 thing, but I only just started using Pandora Radio to the fullest extent. They also have a paid account which gets rid of all advertisements and makes for a better experience.

If you are looking to discover some new artists and expand your musical horizons, well Pandora Radio is a great place to start. It's free and easy to use and I hope you get as much enjoyment out of it as I have.