I chose Pandora because I was hoping to find music clips for my blog. I quickly discovered that Pandora is not like that, but I liked it a lot anyway.
It is a site that simulates a radio station, but it plays only the music you like. You type in a song title or artist you would like to hear and from their archive, "The Music Genome Project" they create a playlist of other songs that have the same characteristics. They guarantee not to play the same tune over again in 4 hours of music. You can have multiple playlists, which are called "radio station."
Pandora is free. If you subscribe for pay you get enhanced content. Because of licencing agreements you can't do certain things to the songs, like rewind or fast forward, but you can erase songs from the list, mark them as ones you really like, skip forward or back through the list, stop in mid-song. It's not obvious to the text-oriented among us at first, what to do, but a little exploration quickly shows you. It's hard to backtrack through the different pages. The navigation is a bit rudimentary, but adequate.
You can customize your radio station by adding other songs and artists. You can tell them never to play a certain tune again!
You can bookmark songs you like as you hear them. This is a good aide-memoir for making future playlists.
You can makes links to your radio stations on your blog. You can link from your web page to your Pandora profile. You can fill in personal stuff about you and make notes on the music.
Uses in libraries: suggested listening lists on web pages or blogs. Uses for the info in the Music Genome Project.
I can see that the analyses of the music and the categories would be very useful to musicologists. The database is not infinite but very large and growing all the time. New musicians can add themselves. This could be a wonderful resource for anyone researching emerging music.
Meanwhile, I am having great fun!
I am creating a link to my radio stations on my blog sidebar.
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