Streaming radio with no audible ads and the music custom-chosen to your tastes, it’s hard to imagine many improvements that could be made to Pandora.
Sign up for an account so you can keep track of your radio stations and preferences. Then just enter either a song title you want to listen to or a particular artist and Pandora will look into its database and see the musical qualities of that song or artist and start playing songs with similar qualities. You’re allowed to save multiple “stations” so you can have different tracks for different moods. As the songs come up, you just vote ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ and Pandora learns to improve the songs it chooses for you. It’s pretty simplistic and very enjoyable. I’m sure it could use some more details, such as why you don’t like that particular song, but it seems to work out alright. I’ve had a few where I liked the song, but just found the live versions particularly annoying.
Entering a song title will not cause Pandora to play that song immediately. That “on-demand” and “streaming” doesn’t seem to go together for license reasons, but most of the time it will get to that song, or at least that artist, shortly. I’ve found a lot of good songs to later buy to improve my music collection so that I could play them on demand and on the go. If you have a Sprint phone, you can get Pandora on your cell. I don’t have Sprint, but wish they had not gone exclusive.
This post written up while listening to…
Pandora