Pandora Internet Radio

If you haven’t caught on to this yet, you need to. I heard about Pandora maybe back in January-ish from a developer friend of mine while I was in Kansas City. It’s great. Feel free to check out my Pandora stations.

Here’s how it works:

1. Setup a free account
2. Create a “station” – simply choose either an artist or a song
3. Pandora will search the database for this artist or song, and start playing
4. All songs/artists in the Pandora database have musical stylings attached to them. As a song starts playing you can choose to either give it a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Thumbs down will eliminate that song from playing again on that station.
5. As you vote up and down, Pandora will begin to learn your musical preferences in each of your stations (you can create multiple stations)

That’s pretty much it. You then just sit back and enjoy the music. You’ll hear songs and artists you’ve never heard of before, and you’ll hear songs and artists that you really want to … but, you have to do your part in voting on the songs Pandora serves up.

I’ve got five different stations right now, only four that I really spend time in:

• Worship Radio
• David Crowder Radio
• Swing-Rock Radio
• Buddy Guy Radio

I started a station by seeding it with artists like Chris Tomlin, Charlie Hall, Hillsong, David Crowder, Rueben Morgan and Passion. It’s now learned (over a bit of time and voting), and now it’s serving up a ton of other artists in the same line of music (Vicky Beeching, Darlene Zschech, Geoff Moore, Decemberradio, Todd Agnew, Barlow Girl, Delirious, Telecast and even lesser-known artists like Josh Bates, Brandon Heath, Jesse Daniels and Sam Perry (2pts to whoever knows who Sam Perry is … awesome!). It’s even served up some Sister Hazel, Hootie and Better than Ezra.

I started my swing rock station by seeding Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. I’m now getting them plus O.C. Supertones, Five Iron Frenzy, MXPX, Relient K and more.

I started my Buddy Guy station with … well, Buddy Guy. I added B.B. King and Big Jack Johnson. I’ve got some great Blues and Jazz coming out of that station!

It’s great! Of course, I’m on the internet all day while I’m building web sites, so it’s easy for me to just hit it and go. I’m absolutely addicted to it. It’s great!

Try it out. Play around with it. You’ll get hooked.