Pandora, Internet radio from the Music Genome Project

Tracy Cox of San Francisco, talks about why he can't live without his Pandora.

Pandora is one part of the holy trinity of technology. (My MacBook Pro and Gmail are the other two.) Pandora is an online service that lets me create customized radio stations and listen to them for free. (It’s ad-supported.)

I have Pandora up on my browser all day, all the time. If you listen for a week, it will never play anything you don’t absolutely love. It plays stuff you might not think you would have liked. If there’s anything else out there like Pandora, I haven’t seen it.

Pandora’s Music Genome Project has mapped attributes of artists’ music, sort of like mapping their musical DNA. Say you really like John Legend. When you enter his name or one of his songs into the system, Pandora will pull artists or songs with similar traits and play those on the radio station you create. There is no limit to how many stations you can create. Then, you can tell Pandora whether you like the song it’s playing by clicking on a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down.” The more input you give Pandora, the better it can customize stations to fit your taste. It adapts to you.

Is it an iPod substitute? Not really. I use my iPod when I know what songs I want to listen to. I use Pandora when I don’t know exactly what I feel like listening to.