Adam was kind enough to send me an invite to Pandora, a new music radio site. First impressions are that it looks pretty good but I do not think it is as good as Launchcast with yahoo.
The first artist I added to the radio was Petra – It didn’t have any Petra tracks so decided to add a track similar to Petra. Now Petra are a rock band and the track that was similar was some kind of latino string music – NOTHING like Petra’s stuff at all. I deleted the station and created one for the Newsboys. It told me that it would play a track similar to the Newsboy’s music…and proceeded to play Take Me To Your Leader by…..The Newsboys! The next three tracks were Sunfair by Creeper Lagoon and HumanKind by Grant-Lee Philips (who sounds VERY similar to Newsboys) followed by Radiation Vibe by Fountains of Wayne.
Without the possibility to pause, rewind, fastforward or add other artists to a station to influence the music I’m just not impressed. The only good thing is that it doesn’t have the ads that Launchcast has – but then this is a paid for service (when it comes out of beta) and the paid version of launchcast also doesn’t contain adverts (allegedly). It does live up to its promise of introducing you to new music as I had never heard of any of the three bands that it proceeded to play after the named track.
Comments
Thanks for taking time to play with Pandora. Sorry that you had a bad experience trying to make a great Petra station. I’ve sent your post along to the Music Genome team and they’ll figure out what’s going wrong with those matches.
You can pause and fast forward with Pandora (in top right hand corner or the UI; perhaps they’re a bit too subtle). Our music licenses won’t allow for rewind… the publishers would like you to purchase tracks if you want to hear a song over and over. A service like ours that allowed for rewind would have to be much, much more expensive.
You can also add addition artist influences to the station by using “Guide Us”. Clicking that button reveals a panel that lets you rate songs (which will immediately tune the station to your preferences) and add more kinds of music (artists/songs) into the mix.
Thanks again for listening to Pandora; your feedback is extremely valuable.
Tom
CTO @ Pandora