pandora.com just rocks!
Being in the computer industry for over ten years it's unfortunately not too often I'm surprised by new products or services brought to market, but I had just such an occurance this week. An old friend refered me to the music service at pandora.com via an automated invitation which sat in my inbox for a few days. A bit of curiosity got me to click the link rather than just trash the e-mail and boy am I glad I did.
I was presented with a clean flash interface which simply asked, 'type in the name of your favorite artist, song or composer and we'll create a radio station featuring that music and more like it.' I figured what the hay, and entered 'Dave Matthews Band'. Within seconds I was listening to a fairly high-quality version of 'Grace Is Gone'.
The simple interface immediately started playing another acoustic male vocalist immediately after that track was done. One which I didn't care for, so I clicked the thumbs-down, 'i don't like it' icon. It immediately started playing something better and this has continued for the past two days, and I'm more impressed than ever now.
Now I'm someone who has over 14,000 songs on a RAID mirrors set of hard drives that I"ve been compiling since Napster 1.0, and to suggest hanging up the mass storage devices and replace it with a network service has always sounded absurd to me but no longer. I've been impressed in the past with plug-in like Synapse for WinAmp which would presume to learn (and did a decent job of that), your listening habbits and Pandora does just this, but takes it a step further... plays shit you've NEVER heard of but will actually REALLY like!
So long story short. It took about two days of telling it what I don't like, but I have to say it hits a homerun with every track it selects now. Every time!
