The website pandora.com is a free site offered by the Music Genome Project. In it’s most basic form, Pandora finds and plays music for you after you have entered the name of an artist, album, or song name that you like. They rate their music library as containing about 400,000 songs from more than 20,000 different artists, all of which have been evaluated in terms of musical qualities which allow them to quantify a song and play others that have similar qualities to the music you like. Their library is vast – I haven’t found any big-name artists missing, and almost all of the smaller names also have a place in their library. The only musical gap that they admit to having in their FAQ page is Classical music because of how difficult it would be to classify and quantify different pieces (they do provide a link to an online radio station that plays classical music, so this gap in their library shouldn’t pose a problem).

Using Pandora is fairly simple and straightforward:

1) Create an account. This lets you listen to the music you like from remote computers. You will stay logged in unless you tell it to log out, even if you clear cookies, files, and history (from Internet Explorer on a Windows machine).

2) Enter a song, album, or artist you like. A station will be created to play music similar to the music you entered. You can theoretically create up to 100 stations, though I am still a long way from that number. A station can be deleted if you get tired of it or if you have reached your maximum number of stations and want to create another.

3) Listen to music. As you listen to a song, you can give it either a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down”. This gives them more of an idea of what you like. There are controls that allow you to pause/play the music, though I don’t use this often, so I can’t comment on how well it works. You can also skip the currently playing song and go on to the next song. There is a limit to the number of times you can skip ahead in an hour, but if you reach that limit, you can change stations (which will start a new song from the new station) and then switch back to the first station you were listening to, which starts a new song.

You can’t choose individual songs to listen to, however if a song is played that you like, Pandora will give you a link to buy the song from iTunes or Amazon. The only potential limitation to this is iTunes or Amazon not having a song in the Pandora library, though in my experience this is rare.

The website to visit is

http://www.pandora.com