Thanks to the recommendation of the excellent browse-nutty site, WebUpon, my husband and I found a source of music that suits our moods, whatever they happen to be -- and the service is completely customizable, and free.
Pandora uses a system called the Music Genome Project to organize hundreds of musical attributes in thousands upon thousands of songs. That information is used to determine what you hear, according to the artists or songs you set up to develop the sound of your personal radio station. There's a very lengthy FAQ on-site to help you broaden, narrow, develop, and share your station with others. You can run several stations, build a personal profile (mine makes a nice example), and create specific station pages, rather as if they had profiles of their own.
There's a fairly active community there also, commenting on the artists or albums, and offering suggestions for similar musical tastes. I can't get enough of this place; it drives me happily through my workday, introduces me to "new" artists and songs I've missed, and addresses my own slightly obsessive-compulsive need to label and categorize things in a really fun way.
So, what are the potential negatives?
Pandora uses a thumbs-up, thumbs-down rating system, which does a fine job of refining the station as you go, but you are limited to 6 thumbs-down or song skips per hour. I happen to have two stations, and have been using this service for over a week. I have only switched stations once to bypass the skip limit, but your mileage may vary.
Once you've started to build a song list, you'll hear some of your thumbs-up songs more often than you might like, but you have the option of "snoozing" the song (for a month, by default) rather than removing it from your station. Probably my biggest question about the service in the beginning was whether I'd ever get to hear the songs I chose to "seed" the station, since their license doesn't allow them to play on-demand. It took at least three days, but yes! Your seed songs do show up eventually.
As a final, depends-on-you issue, I'm fairly certain there are advertisements above and below the station player. Since the service is free, if I could see them, I wouldn't have a problem with them. As it is, between my FireFox browser and the Adblock Plus extension, I've never seen an ad.
From my perspective, most of the "negatives" are actually positives in practice, and even the advertisements -- if there are any -- are dependent upon your browsing methods. I love this service, and wholeheartedly recommend it.
Pandora uses a system called the Music Genome Project to organize hundreds of musical attributes in thousands upon thousands of songs. That information is used to determine what you hear, according to the artists or songs you set up to develop the sound of your personal radio station. There's a very lengthy FAQ on-site to help you broaden, narrow, develop, and share your station with others. You can run several stations, build a personal profile (mine makes a nice example), and create specific station pages, rather as if they had profiles of their own.
There's a fairly active community there also, commenting on the artists or albums, and offering suggestions for similar musical tastes. I can't get enough of this place; it drives me happily through my workday, introduces me to "new" artists and songs I've missed, and addresses my own slightly obsessive-compulsive need to label and categorize things in a really fun way.
So, what are the potential negatives?
Pandora uses a thumbs-up, thumbs-down rating system, which does a fine job of refining the station as you go, but you are limited to 6 thumbs-down or song skips per hour. I happen to have two stations, and have been using this service for over a week. I have only switched stations once to bypass the skip limit, but your mileage may vary.
Once you've started to build a song list, you'll hear some of your thumbs-up songs more often than you might like, but you have the option of "snoozing" the song (for a month, by default) rather than removing it from your station. Probably my biggest question about the service in the beginning was whether I'd ever get to hear the songs I chose to "seed" the station, since their license doesn't allow them to play on-demand. It took at least three days, but yes! Your seed songs do show up eventually.
As a final, depends-on-you issue, I'm fairly certain there are advertisements above and below the station player. Since the service is free, if I could see them, I wouldn't have a problem with them. As it is, between my FireFox browser and the Adblock Plus extension, I've never seen an ad.
From my perspective, most of the "negatives" are actually positives in practice, and even the advertisements -- if there are any -- are dependent upon your browsing methods. I love this service, and wholeheartedly recommend it.
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