Glad to hear it. Dry Tobacco Road is going into the studio this Sunday Dec 4th.
A friend of mine at UTSA told me about Pandora and so far I'm really impressed. It looks like you guys might be making a commitment to something new and dangerous on the internet. A streaming radio outlet for unsigned underground music. Although I have yet to hear any on my radio station, I'm glad to see you welcome submissions. That's really cool. This is how radio should be. More variety, taylored to smaller audiences, even audiences of one, with a DJ who plays what you like and occasionally throws something in that you may not have heard, but might fall in love with. Excellent.
On top of all that, it's portable, marketable, sustainable, and has it's own blog. Fantastic!

I can't say enough about how wonderful Pandora is. May I be the first (?) to wish you a prosperous new year.

Although I haven't seen mention of it, Pandora's jazz library is worth noting. The search filter is cool, but lacking a mechanism for sharing individually groomed Pandora stations with strangers (hint to Santa!), here's a nod to fellow jazz fans: 'Trane Station - http://pandora.com/?sc=sh1417423

Hey John,
When I clicked your name it opened a window with Trane Station and began playing it. In the same window it also had my station KEWL. Dig the jazz.

So far the techno scene is represented well. Humpty Vission, Bad Boy Bill, and Baby Anne all get much love from pandora!

So far the techno scene is represented well. Humpty Vission, Bad Boy Bill, and Baby Anne all get much love from pandora!

When will there be a Pandora API? I would love to play with it...

Pandora is .the.most. extraordinary internet discovery of the year for me.

My co-worker and I have spent this whole week listening at work and trading songs, artists, new finds back and forth. We may get fired, but for now it's been great!

All the best for the coming year. I've forwarded music submission information to my two favorite local artists, and I'm sure there will be more to follow.

I think this is going to be the thing that will push me over the edge into getting a direct cable hookup for my internet at home instead of my poor low tech dial-up connection that I've had for so long. No small feat, I can tell you.

Thanks!!!!!

Hey,I'm japanese student learning C programming and computer sciences but I use regularly Pandora.
I was amazed at the new idea and business model.
I recommend around my friends.
I'll keep track of Pandora.
Thanks.

I was very impressed to see 2 out of 3 of my favorite obscure bands represented... :D

But I wanted to comment/question: Are there any plans in place for the theme of a song or artist to be included amongst its characteristics? I put in Weird Al Yankovic, expecting to hear bands like the Arrogant Worms, maybe some Dr. Demento show tracks, and got several different "serious" songs back instead...

I've only been playing with this for a few days, and I'm really impressed. I was looking for a way to submit feedback and found this blog. I was going suggest that you change the title bar of the browser to show the album/song/artist so you could see it in your taskbar, but it looks like you added that since I was listening at work yesterday :D

So here's a few more ideas:

1) Create a new station by genre. For instance, Acid Jazz or Dirty Rock and Roll
2) Add tags to stations you create. Kind of like the genre idea. If you add that in, then you can:
3) Search other stations.
4) Thumbs up or down is cool, and seems to tailor the stations pretty well. But it might be better if you had a sliding scale, say 1-10, on how appropriate the song is to the station.
5) "Block Artist" option. I've had some artists show up who I hate, but are still similar to the other ones I'm trying to get on a station. I can give them a thumbs down, but they'd still come back.

Anyways, I just wanted to say thanks for a really great application.

Oh, and if anyone knows of a better place to put suggestions, please let me know. I kind of figured this would work, but who knows if there's anyone actually reading the comments here?

Pandora is so cool I really like how they play songs like the ones you like but that jazz library has got to go i mean come on. Sure this aint the best thing to happen but its pretty close.

My friend directed me here, and he in turn was directed from the classic rock forums, I believe... I'm absolutely astonished! The song selections for me thus far have been incredibly accurate no matter what I put in, and I've already found a bunch of new songs to track down.

I was noticing that a lot of the songs I used to create stations had similar traits, and I was wondering if it would be possible, for people with accounts, to keep track of the "Traits" of the music that they like ("heavy metal improvisation", "Mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation", etc.) and then have the ability to randomly suggest a song based on how high the various traits seem to factor into their musical taste.

Sorry if this isn't the place for suggestions, but I couldn't figure out where else to try!

So far, everything I see is great.. it works like a charm. However, I'd like to see a desktop player version of pandora that would play music through the same stream, only without having to have a browser window open.

Just discovered the site and wanted to say thank you and great job! I've been unable to pull away from the computer.

Hi John,

A friend from Montreal showed me the site and I started listening but can't continue due to the account restrictions. When is it going to be available to Canadians? Can that be answered in the FAQ section sometime.

Happy early holidays. cheers.

I love the site-I just discovered it today and I already have 2 stations set up. This is, in my humble opinion, the greatest advancement ever made in online music sharing/distribution. Pandora seems to have a short memory though...when I add multiple artists, it seems to play a lot more of the artists I add later than the artists I added previously.

Hi!

I think its about time I posted my thanks to the folks here at Pandora. Ive been listening for a good few months now, and Im really pleased with it.
Its good to see music being added almost daily, and I have now been able to find more of my favorite artiests.
Its pretty much taken off here in work in a big way and everyone I talk to always has good things to say :)
Well heres to a fantastic christmas and a great new year, and what I'm positive will be a great year of music from Pandora!

This is one of those 'why didn't I think of that' things that inspires both envy and childlike joy! Good for you guys.

It's fantastic - never before have I been able to recommend the same site to every single one of my friends.

Once you have the 'don't return songs by this artist on future selections' facility it'll be perfect!

I think there's a lot of promise with Pandora, but it's extremely, extremely frustrating so far.

Entering "J. S. Bach" I got back "Bacharach", blech! You don't even have any Bach yet! No wonder when I tried to find lesser known classical composers I came up with nothing.

M

Hi, you can ignore my previous comment. I just read the FAQs and now I realize there is no Classical or World music.

Im sure I'll have a much less frustrating experience with Pandora now. :)

I really appreciate what you are doing, and I hope that through plentiful right clicks, you are able to keep funding this through amazon and I-tunes.

However, I find that most of the time, the music I enter is not in the database. This can range from light jazz and classical to easy listening, cheesy 70's electronic music, or library music. This is the music I find most appropriate for work. Is there a way to browse the selections that you have by "genome" to create better stations? Perhaps you have some documentation that couls act as a guide.

Thanks.

That Mark Hollis record is a gem. The most sublime moments of Talk Talk's brilliant latter years, distilled into a quiet, gorgeous record. Thanks for reminding me to dig that one out again!

And, of course, thanks for Pandora.

my old band, Automind, played what I call "brutal cosmic doom". influences: Sabbath, Slayer, Morbid Angel, Electric Wizard

it can be freely used.

enjoy.

also, as long as I'm asking questions, is there a music term glossary for pandora?

great site/service. thank you.

It's a hot summer's evening. You and your girl are on the roof of an apartment building in a large city. A trumpet or a saxophone begins to play...

My song. That's my song being played.

Can you tell me the genre and some song titles and names of some artists of that song? I know it's jazz, but what king?

This is a fantastic idea. You guys rock. I hope this is a great success!

Hey, I'll second the comment about trying to start a "Weird Al" station and getting nothing remotely like what I was expecting. I even tried adding Tom Lehrer to the mix (now that is REALLY going back!) and while it found selections by both artists, it kept trying to intersperse serious music. You definitely ought to have a "clean humor/parody" genre. I hadn't thought about it but depending on how far back you want to go, Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart released quite a bit of their material on disc, that would also fit in such a genre.

I have a suggestion, have a checkbox on the player that says "profanity filter" - if checked it would not play recordings that contain the "f" word or other overt profanity. Not only would this help parent who may have children in the room (and people who just plain don't enjoy listening to profanity), but in the long run it might help keep you out of hot water (perhaps with lawmakers who would see the profanity as a reason to regulate services like his one). By giving people a choice, you can say that no one is forced to listen to it in order to use the service.

Hi, first off, I love Pandora. I use it almost every day.

It does have one mind-boggling feature, though. It doesn't seem to see the forest for the trees. I mean, I can plug in a bunch of bands and musicians with female vocals -- but Pandora doesn't seem to recognise this very basic characteristic of each band. I mean, I put PJ Harvey, Belly, and Neko Case into the system and I got recommended band after band after band featuring nothing but male vocals.

pandora is an awesome idea.
sadly it doesn't really work for "non-gangsta"-rap. whatever band i use for setting up a station, i end up hearing the crap that made me turn of urban radio stations. the pandora idea doesn't work with rap so far. i hope that will change.

..and i hope pandora doesn't end up as a marketing tool.

Listen to me carefully. Pandora will revolutionize the way music will be treated. It will turn the way we choose music up side down. Keep it up! The lack of choice in some genres (the most common critique i've heared so far) will be solved soon I'm sure, since the success is growing exponentialy. My advice is: invest, invest, invest. This is an awesome formula. For the love of ... abuse it!

i <3 pandora. o so macodocious. ive been telling everyone that has ears about this site.

its like christmas everday. but free!?!

I'd like to see the genome itself. I really like the concept - it is a brilliant idea. It would be nice to be able to look at the entire genome and select the desired attributes to create a station. I think that feature would take this concept to the next level.

This blog still have people asking to be able to select genres. But it seems to me that the attributes or "genomes" are more fundamental than genres. With your vast library of tunes and the ability to select songs with a given set of attributes, you could create your own personal genres. I'd love to try that!

Thanks!

I LOVE this piece of webware :)
I would love if you made it stand alone (i.e. wrap it in a flash player) or as a plugin for winamp :P

keep it up!

Yes, selecting Genome traits would be an AWESOME way of doing things (I've been thinking about that being a good thing for quite a while) but if you like way too much types of music, you can run into MAJOR problems selecting music for a station. I like many genres ranging for classical, to metal, to almost every electronic genre, and would like my stations to keep VERY close to the original artist I used, but I'm having trouble since i like a lot of stuff.

It's especially hard with stuff like Iced Earth, which has a unique, heavily melodic, rhythm-guitar based music style, when I'm getting stuff considered nu-metal on the same station, we NEED ways of filtering out stuff we absolutely do NOT want on a station. I would eprsonally like to get inside the song selection mechanism and be able to tailor it to perfection by both using music, and selecting exact music genome traits, and I would appreciate genre filters.

If you look at how metal-archives.com classifies their music, they have basically keywords that modify the style to help classify specific genres. for example, on there Iced Earth shows up as Power/thrash metal, which is very accurate, but they also have lyrical themes, which show up for iced earth as Horror, Suffering, History, Vengeance. Not only do they have those features, which help you get a good idea of the feeling the music exhibits, as well as the actual style, but you can see what bands the members, current and past, have been in, or are in. this allows you to hear bands which are similar due to the type of music that the members play. there should also be genome traits for the overall mood of the song, considering sometiums I will only listen to songs which exhibit a specific mood.

All in all, I'm saying we need a LOT more customization and controll over the station, as well as the genome project needs to have more traits, otherwise there will be little practical use for people who aren't cornering ourselves to a single genre, or small selection of music.

Wow!
I love the site/service. Please keep encouraging the new, rare, and loacal talent.
This is going to be a very expensive discovery I can tell (I need to increase the music purchasing budget). Good luck guys, it's obvious by the clean design and smooth operation that lots of hard work has gone into the site. This is the kind of subtle weaving of NLP/Search into a an audience experience that is going to propel the web to the next level (the real Web 2.0)
For others that want some insight into what went into this service see: http://www.ventureblog.com/articles/indiv/2005/001216.html
Me I'm blaming David Hornik for the melted plastic in my wallet.
Cheers!

How about Confessions of a Broken Heart by Lindsay Lohan? I hate her so much, but there's something about that song that I really like.

hey all - thanks for the comments and suggestions! we DO read everything you folks send in or post here, so please keep the great ideas coming! hope you're checking out the stations I pimped up above, and hope you're having excellent holiday seasons so far!
best,
mz

I absolutly love Pandora!
I love that I can get all my favorite bands.

Ever consider getting some Teddy Geiger on here?
( I dont think it is on yet)

i'm spreading word about Pandora...

The biggest problem I see it is that.. it doesnt have classical music at all??
I cannot find anything even of.. verdi, mozart, Beethoven. T_T
Howcome?

Pandora is an absolutely brilliant idea that's long overdue. So please don't take offense if I bring up a few "issues" here and there.

Issue 1: Experimental music (e.g., atonal, arhythmic, musique concrete, etc) is often shoehorned into a rock/jazz framework. Terms like "mellow rock instrumentation", "simple high hat part", etc are used to describe works that have nothing to do with music in the traditional sense. Someone with a solid background in avant garde music should be reviewing and describing these pieces on their own terms.

Just a thought. I still luv ya! ;-)

Just started using it. You guys are fucking brilliant. Ive discovered more new music in the past day than I have in the past year.

I have had Dell MusicMatch for a year and iTunes for two months. I discovered Pandora two days ago and as far as I am concered, the other two are retired!

It not only gives me the songs I want, the Why did I pick this song? feature teaches me about my taste in music.

Thanks for this great service.

Just started listening to Pandora after having Launchcast go sour by reducing their catalog because of legal negotiations.
The biggest plus, so far, is the several artists I've heard on Pandora that are completely new to me. I realize that the system is in it's infancy but there are several issues that need to be addressed.
I still am not clear whether Pandora is restricted from playing certain artists or labels. It would seem that they are since I've not heard quite a few of the artists that I've requested. The folks at Pandora seem like they are willing to be very helpful an honest with their listeners. I hope they pursue a policy of informing people exactly what they can and cannot offer. Secondly, I'm sure this point has probably been made before but the repetition of artists needs to be fixed. I noticed an artist played twice in 3 songs and 3 times within one hour. One of the reasons I became frustrated with Launchcast was the way artists were begining to repeat more often but they never repeated as often as I'm hearing on Pandora. And I certainly don't think it's a lack of artists that I've entered (around 80 so far).
Pandora has some real potential but I would like to see some of the major bugs worked out before I will recommend them to anyone.

Hola mi nombre es Patricia y soy de España, hoy encontré esta dirección y me parece una página muy atractiva pero no tengo ni idea de como manejarla. Alguien podría ayudarme??

Un saludo, good bye

if you guys ever get rid of this site i swear i will shoot you all down with a bb gun. =]

thanks so much its a brilliant idea! Good Luck.

<3

I totally dig this! i've been all over itunes radio (specifically radio paradise), sirius and yahoo music but i get bored with them often. i think i've found something i can rest upon. ;) although i can't figure out why it keeps playing the same songs more than once.
anyway, a little note....ya gotta add HALOU to your library. definately. thanks, and you can bet i'll be spreading the word.

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What I like is that whatever means you use to broadcast music, I can hear it at work. They've disabled most everything that will take bandwidth, although I have found some java players that work.

My only complaint is really niche music, namely, Caribbean calypso and SOCA has been hard to find due to the manner in which the music is indexed. On the other hand, Reggae and more modern music seems well represented. Kudoes!

First of all: Thank you for such an excellent service. I've been listening to Pandora and almost nothing else for a couple of weeks now.

I'd be great if you could keep track of tracks (pun unintended) you play for longer than one session. I'd suggest something like submitting played track listings to the excellent last.fm/audioscrobbler service; there are APIs available to do this. See http://last.fm

Thanx and happy holidays, i cant seem to get away from this thing.. If it was a woman i might be willing to marry it..I do have one problem with the program, when i select jazz song that has a latin influence why doesnt every song end up with a latin influence..A means of keeping the music in a time frame say the 60's or 50's might be useful also.

I was surprised and pleased to see Mark Hollis on your list! His album is a quiet masterpiece, much like the last few Talk Talk albums. Everyone should give it a listen.

One forgotten band you don't have in your collection is Crack the Sky. Rolling Stone picked their debut self titled album as Album of the Year in 1975 (I think). No kidding, the first album is a MASTERPIECE and you should add it to your collection. The band made other albums, split up and rejoined and every once in awhile gets back together to play in a moderately sized venue. They have a core of still devoted fans and have recently remastered all of their old stuff, so you can get them easily. Thanks to disco, the debut album got NO airplay. And some of the songs like "Ice", "Mind Baby" and "She's a Dancer" would ALL have been hits if anyone ever heard them. A shame. But this is what Pandora is all about ... to introduce people to new music that they would love, if they were only introduced. Thanks for the introductions. Keep up the good work.

First - freekin WOW, what a great idea/radio station!

could you somehow modulate the volumes so that all the tracks have similar levels? I had to crank my stereo to hear a michael hedges track, and then Peter Frampton came on and was a little louder, and then Leo Kottke was a little louder still - small, but important.

also, Could the radio station play more of the artist that you originally started it with? Or could that be an option? i.e., I started a station called King's X, and for two days now, I have only heard two King's X songs. How about if when you started a session, the first song would be from the original group you started the station with?

Another thing would be to have another line in the ratings system, and to be able to set the station to play more of an artist that you REALLY like, but maybe it isn't about artists, as I read this more, its about each song. HMM

Last - could you enter into each song the artist who played - and that can be a criteria as well - Like if you like a tune off of Steely Dan's Royal Scam, and the drummer is Jeff Porcaro, maybe a Toto song would be next, and so on. Or is that already part of it? There are some artists out there whose primary band's are in the genome, but not their solo work - case in point, Ty Tabor/King's X. Some fantastic music may be missed from this case - but I suppose, so much music, and so little time, right?

Anyway, Fantastic idea. Love it. Is there a listener input page?

This was recommended to me by someone who frequently listens to what i am (via shoutcast servers located here and my sister site in jersey).

I think it is so amusing that you can't skip songs because of licensing restrictions... what with search engines and P2P you'd think that this - what would seem to be academic - site would be cut a little slack. i cringe at the thought of seeing the top 20 played stations. Whenever you guys want a hand with classical music, shoot me an email (i put in the proper one!)

I'll also be submitting some songs... although i can't afford frills or silver pressings.

the only feature request i would like is to see the traversal of the "tree" or whatever it is you guys are using; if i put in 'spears', a text list of the next 100 songs played would be cool. i'm just a statistician at heart. XML would probably allow you to do such things as thumbs up and thumbs down... oh i just realized this wouldn't work because it would let you repeatedly refine your searches until you could exploit it to get a song you wanted to listen to play. Humans. /sigh.

anyhow, rockin idea, i'd still love to see the theory behind it, and i'll refine the station i am listening to now until it's the best representation of "Dark, Melodic, Psy-tekk-without-the-crap-house-elements" ever.

Thanks for putting forth the obviously large amount of time, money, sweat, and blood that went into this project.

Later!

Oh, and this is just a side note... the purpose of this site, the original intent, from what i have gathered:

It is not to say "why haven't i heard yet!" If you want to hear a specific song by a specific band, there are wonderful search engines out there for that purpose!

This site is here to expand musical tastes, to show you bands you probably haven't heard of, to show you why you like the stuff you do, and to just provide that "background music" to your daily life.

Requesting songs and stuff that lets you restrict years and genres and subgenres and whatnot is counter to the very essence of what this site strives to provide, from what i have read and seen.

Two thumbs down on an artist removes them from your station, and MAY also prevent other similar songs from appearing on your station. while you're busy refining your station, don't forget that you're still probably hearing new stuff. Some genres are harder to tailor than others, it's part of the dynamic of musical art.

This isn't intended as a flame, so sorry if it appears that way at points. it's 7:31AM and i have to be up in 4 hours to work. hooray me!

I´ve meet Pandora thanks to another user.
Im surprised like the way that it works and defines some music tendences of mine, like mild accoustic sincopation, mixed accoustic & electric, hard rock roots....
In a future please include latin singers and music.
Greetings from the North of the South

Life _should_ have a soundtrack, and it's called Pandora. And because of you I've heard some things that I haven't before - I guess it really is Pandora's box that you've had me open. Sometimes it's just fun to type some arbitrary band name in, pick a selection you've never heard of, and listen for an hour. I'd love to be able to pick through the genome itself though and pick 3 or 4 different nodes and see what comes up - hold on this could be a wild ride through music you never knew about.
A nod goes out to HMK for her email on you. Thanks!

Cool Site !