Why Pandora Rocks

Kent Newsome got me thinking that I ought to write a post about my own Pandora experience. I've been using Pandora for a couple of months now and given the spate of recent posts about the comparison between Pandora and Last.fm I guess now is as good a time as any to say why I think Pandora rocks.

Reason 1 - Through Pandora I discovered Howie Day. Both Pandora and Last.fm help you discover talented artists that you haven't heard before taking an artist you choose as the starting point of the discovery process. That's really where the similarity ends. Pandora is built on an approach in which music tracks are decomposed into over 400 attributes which include things like melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics and then plays songs with interesting musical similarities to your chosen artist. Last.fm is based on social recommendations. It works on the principle that the people who share an interest in one artist probably share an interest in other artists. Steve Krause has written a much more insightful article on the differences between the two approaches which is well worth a read.

I created a station on Pandora with a starting point of James Blunt. Within minutes the station played a track called "She Says" by Howie Day. I've been a little obsessed ever since. I've bought the album, I play the album in the car to and from work, I've ripped it to my laptop to play to myself at work, I've moved tracks onto my phone to use as my ringtone and my alarm. It's likely I would never have discovered Howie without Pandora, so in my world Pandora rocks.


Reason 2 - Pandora has a very clean and simple interface. Getting started is simple. For me Pandora wins hands down on usability.

Reason 3 - Last.fm wouldn't let me start from James Blunt as my favourite artist. It only says "Artist not streamable".

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