If you’ve never heard of Pandora.com you’re really missing out. I don’t work them, heck, I wasn’t even introduced to them by a web ad. I googled “internet radio” one day while bored at work and stumbled upon it. Little did I know what I was in for when I loaded this seemingly “blah” website…
Pandora.com was founded by Tom Westergen and The Music Genome Project (a group of music lovers, who in 2000 began organizing every song that’s ever been professionally recorded into a free online music database; creating the smartest virtual DJ ever). The site makes accessing music so easy and for me (a C6 quad with paralyzed fingers), this is a huge reason my heart shines amore on it 🙂 Now….all my flumsy CD cases do is sit and collect dust.
To use Pandora, just follow these 2 easy steps: 1) Register and 2) Start creating your “radio stations.” The idea is that you put in either your favorite artist or favorite song, and then Pandora instantly starts playing songs that are alike musically to whatever “radio station” you just created. Their database is vast and picking an artist or song it doesn’t know can prove difficult (a good thing). Pandora even knew who Utada was (a famous Japanese pop star), so I could play Pandora at a Japanese-themed party I threw last July.
And Pandora is especially great for parties. It plays song after song unendingly, becoming your “Slave DJ,” so you can busy yourself with your drunk guests and soon-to-be-empty margarita pitcher. I just plug in my $20.00 speakers (from Target) into my laptop in the party space, and then let this smarty-pants-site do all the work. And if you compile an extensive “radio station” list (I can guarantee this will happen), you can put Pandora on “Quick Mix,” where it shuffles from radio station to radio station (playing two songs from each radio station at a time).
I rarely, if ever, pimp out a website, but this site had made my life so much easier; giving me seamless access to a butt-load of music (saying sayonara to opening CD cases with my pearly whites), that I simply had to do a blog about it.
So, if you’ve tried Pandora before, what are your thoughts on it?