The title says it all. I found out about Pandora's internet music streaming service, ironically, through a Lifehacker article about "Globalpandora.com", a site setup to bypass Pandora's US-only playback restrictions.
Pandora is run by the Music Genome Project, a rather strangely-named "company of musicians". It is an internet radio-style music streaming service with a surprisingly expansive music collection.
The biggest draw for me is their customisable music "stations". Users are able to create their own stations by specifying which artistes they like. These artistes then become the "seeds" for their new stations. Within seconds, the service plays a song sample from the artiste to verify the user's preference. It then proceeds to play songs that have similar attributes to the seed artiste.
What I found pretty impressive were their very comprehensive musical catalog and cataloging. For instance, I managed to find Corrinne May, a Singaporean chanteuse based in LA who's a personal favorite of the Fiancée. Also, the artistes' styles are very vividly described: "strong acoustic sonority, heavy use of harmonies, drifting riffs of strumming". Certainly, these don't sound like standardized descriptions used to classify music en-masse, but rather like carefully curated song selections by music aficionados. They also include a simple thumbs-up/down ratings system that enables you to train the system to play songs that are really close to what you enjoy hearing. At the end, users can name their stations and share them with others, akin to playlists.
And did I mention that it's all free?
I like the fact that it's highly customisable, internet-based (high portability), free and plays a huge collection of music in high quality. Already, I've heard full-length songs from several artistes that I'd never had the chance to hear elsewhere on my "Damien Rice Radio Station". E.g. Jonas and Plunkett, Mick McAuley and Winifre Horan. Who knows? These may actually lead to purchases
Try it now! 3 thumbs up to a viable radio replacement! :)
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2 comments:
yo hong, i've heard about this application before, yanshu mentioned it to me, but never really got my hands to it back then. I guess i must have faced the same problem as what I am encountering now..
"Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. ..."
It's a shame.
PS: Great blog! =) i'll be back for more juicy updates! =P
Yeah it's quite a pity it's unavailable to users outside the US. They do say they're trying to make it available internationally, so stay tuned! :)
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