Pandora

[Astaroth]

So, has anyone heard of Pandora Radio? I'd give the web address, but the mods might remove it. You can just look it up on a search engine if you're interested, though. Basically, when you first go to the site it asks what kind of song or musical artist you like. From that selection, it builds a custom radio station just for you. It picks out songs that are similar to the one you put in and makes an endless playlist of songs for you.

There are two awesome things about it, though. Well, maybe three.

1. It's absolutely free and legal. Basically, it's like free iTunes.
2. You can rate each song that plays as good or bad and narrow your playlist down to specific types of music or groups so that as it picks out new songs it'll take your tastes into consideration.
3. You can build up to 100 radio stations of different types with your free account. If you buy the premium account (which I personally don't think you'd ever even need!) you can build endless playlists.

I'm having a mental orgasm with this thing lately. If you haven't tried it, go check it out. (!)

[shaun]

yah astaroth, in my last job I had to sit in front of a computer all day, but they allowed us to listen to music. Instead of trying to download tons of songs, i just turn on pandora. It might not be immediately appealing cus you can't just tell it to listen to a song then listen to it, it plays a "station" that contains similar music, and includes the music you originally created the station for.

Anyways, give it a try. Only thing that sucks is there's a limit on how many songs u can skip every hour, but it counts them per station... So if you skip all the songs it will let you and can't find anything to listen to, create another station with a similar artist and do it again. Definitely use the thumbs up and thumbs down too, the station will play the songs u thumbs up, every day when you come back to the station, so you could essentially have hours of music you love (thumbs up) before it branches into random other songs.

[Rette]

I used to use Pandora, but sadly, it's unavailable in Canada (and I can't be arsed to use a proxy)

[shaun]

unavailable in canada what? you have the internet don't you? did the government ban it or something?

[sdc91]

Probably copyright laws or something.

I discovered it a few years ago. I used it a little, but it kept giving me Depeche Mode for "The Postal Service" searches. :/

[Rette]

unavailable in canada what? you have the internet don't you? did the government ban it or something?

It has something to do with licensing laws, they can't provide service to anybody outside of the US.

[shaun]

oh I see, so pandora itself is limiting access via ip address. makes sense.

[Level N Human]

I loves Pandora. ^^ I find many other bands through it.

[shaun]

yeah I decided that I can handle folk music, even though I despise country. Loudon Wainwright III, Corey Smith, and Todd Snyder some of my new favorites.

[SlickyPants]

I used to use Pandora all the time until they cut off service outside of the U.S. by IP address. It has exposed me to some music that I would not normally have listened to before.