Pandora, a music box you wanna open...

...

"At Pandora, we have a single mission: To play music you'll love - and nothing else."

Music can be found everywhere on the web: Yahoo, mixwit, Itunes, youtube for videos, Live365, Rhapsody, last.fm, shoutcast, and many others.

There are charges for some, for varying levels of service; others are totally free.

Some have minimal commercial interruptions, others have none.

Some allow you to create your own mixtapes, others allow you to 'program' your own 'station'.

Some have other content, others are strictly audio music.



What I like ...what I use

I have found in using several of these music sites over the years that I want and need a simple service that is always 'up', is easy to program to what I want to listen to, has multiple 'channels' or stations that I can easily customize and choose from, and makes me smile when I listen.

For me, Pandora.com meets those needs.

Basically, Pandora allows you to create multiple stations all as tightly focused or as 'wide open' to a given genre as you want. It has _always_ been available when I have 'dialed it up' and the sound quality of everything I have heard has been excellent.

An excellent FAQ file at Pandora goes into great detail about how to access the site, find the music you like, and fine-tune your online listening experience.




I found this article at pcmech dot com that goes into more detail about making Pandora your own experience.

Unfortunately, I also found a linked discussion that suggested the owners of Pandora may be forced to pull the plug on their business after recent increases in song fees have greatly increased their expenses. That would be a real shame. Pandora radio has been a great source for me to discover new music and has resulted in real-world CD purchases and also purchases of online mp3s.

Image source: fatalcleopatra @ flickr dot com

Sometimes the owners will kill the golden goose to control the profit from it. Big business and regulation is not currently a friend of the wide distribution on online music. Of course, with the financial world collapsing around us, gas prices, ongoing war in the Iraq, why should we expect any peace and quiet and relaxing moments on line..??


Listen now, to Pandora dot com, while you still can.


...tom...
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