Pandora: Absolutely Amazing, Begorrah!

Three Mondays back, I told you that I’d decided to cancel my Sirius Satellite Radio subscription, because I was no longer using the ’satellite’ part of the service and because I was unwilling to continue paying more than $100 per year for low-bitrate, Internet-sourced streaming audio. Now that I’ve sufficiently recovered from the HTML pummeling I got from Sirius shareholders, and now that my office is back together, I went searching this morning for a new source of work-hours (and for that matter, after-hours) background tunes.

Some friends had previously told me about their positive experiences with Pandora, but I confess that although I’m normally pretty leading-edge when it come to adopting new tech trends, I hadn’t yet gotten around to trying out the service. You begin by entering a musician or group that you like; Pandora builds a custom ‘channel’ based on tracks both by that artist and others of a similar genre. You can add musicians and groups to the channel profile to fine-tune the results; you can also give thumbs-up and –down ratings to individual tracks Pandora serves up in order to further customize the subsequent experience.

Within 10 minutes, I’d set up eight different channels based on the diversity of music genres I enjoy. I listened to them throughout the day, and I’m frankly blown away at how well the service tailors its content to my tastes. Pandora is the commercialization of the Music Genome Project, whose algorithm employs more than 400 different attributes (here’s another cut at them) to categorize and identify comparable pieces of music.

Unfortunately, Pandora’s continued fiscal viability (therefore longevity) is unclear, due to a long-running dispute with the record labels over royalty payment amounts. Given the music industry’s financial malaise, and given the declining influence of traditional radio as a promotional vehicle for new artists, I’m not surprised that the labels are striving to end radio’s longstanding performance royalty ‘free ride’. Conversely, I can’t comprehend why content rights owners are striving to put services like Pandora out of business.

At least half of the artists and songs I listened to today were new to me. Pandora makes it easy, albeit not obtrusively so, for listeners to one-click buy tracks they’re listening to (along with the albums containing them) online from merchants like Amazon. And if you try to skip through too many tracks in any given hour-long time period, Pandora informs you that its agreements with the labels put limitations on such behaviour, encouraging you to change channels if necessary in order to reset the ’skip counter’.

In striving to remain financially afloat, Pandora’s site contains a fair number of ads. But since I’m normally listening to it instead of looking at it, I don’t find them too obtrusive. And I haven’t yet come across any of the brief audio commercial interruptions that some users have reported. In addition to the web browser-based application, the company offers standalone apps for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phones, the iPhone and iPod touch, and OS X and Windows. Here’s my list of stations, if you’d like to try them out for yourself.: