Pandora Radio Review

I decided to try this after reading Libby McMillan's review (shameless plug).

Let me start by saying that I have extremely eclectic tastes in music.  A partial list of the artists I like includes: Madonna, Michael Jackson, George Strait, Kathy Mattea, Earth Wind & Fire, Ashanti, The Spice Girls, Alison Krauss, Ludacris, and Jay-Z.

Ok, so the site allows you to create multiple radio stations based on music you like.  You do this by adding "seeds" to a station.  A seed is a song or artist you like.  You then hear music that is similar to what you selected.  If you selected artists, then you hear some songs by those artists and songs by similar artists.  If you use songs as seeds, you will hear songs similar to those you selected, but I don't believe you ever actually hear the songs you used as seeds (at least I never did).  If a song you don't like is played, you can skip it, but you can only skip six songs per hour per station.  You can also give songs thumbs up or thumbs down.  Thumbs down will skip a song.  Thumbs up will increase the frequency with which a song is played (see the site for additional details on the effects of thumbs up and thumbs down, because it's a bit difficult to explain briefly).

I started by creating a master station using the music stored on my computer as a guide and adding A LOT of songs and artists.  That worked okay, but I wasn't overly impressed with the results.

Next, I tried creating a station using just artists as seeds. I found that this worked a lot better.  I was more pleased with the selection of songs, and I actually heard some of the songs I used as seeds for the previous station.

Then, I created several stations in which I used only artists of a specific genre as seeds.  That worked really well, and I was particularly pleased with the country station I created.  The country music I like primarily comes from the 80's and early 90's, so I chose artists who were popular at that time (Suzy Bogguss, Shenandoah, Trisha Yearwood, etc.).  It narrowed down the music exactly how I had hoped it would.

Pandora is free, but you can pay for a subscription for $36 a year.  If you subscribe, the web page becomes ad-free.  Also, you can then take advantage of options to use Pandora on mobile devices/home radio.

The only real downside of the site is the limitation to the number of songs you can skip.  This will be an issue at first, but it should become less of an issue as you get a station more dialed in to exactly what you like.

Overall, if you enjoy music at all, I encourage you to give this a try.  Just be patient with it.