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February 02, 2006
Pandora 2.1: RSS Feeds (Beta)
Tonight we're launching a new set of RSS feeds powered by Pandora's listenership - that's you! With these feeds you'll be able to keep up to date on your friends' stations and favorite songs from any RSS aggregator. You'll also be able to watch as the Pandora community's favorite songs, artists, and stations ebb and flow.
To quickly get started playing with our feeds, you can visit http://www.pandora.com/feeds where you'll find some simple tools for generating Pandora feed URL's. At this point we're providing 5 distinct feed categories:
- A listener-specific feed of favorite songs: keep track of the songs your friends are discovering
- A listener-specific feed of stations: keep a running list of your friends Pandora stations
- A Pandora-wide feed of the top-rated songs playing on Pandora*
- A Pandora-wide feed of the top-rated artists playing on Pandora*
- A Pandora-wide feed of the most-shared stations playing on Pandora*
For each of these feeds, you can control the number of items you want to receive, as well as the time period you're interested in. For example, maybe you want to get back the top-10 best-rated artists playing on Pandora over the course of the last week. Visit the feed generator page for the all the details.
Once you've created a feed URL it's a simple matter of subscribing in your favorite aggregator (for example, My.Yahoo!, live.com Bloglines, NetNewsWire, etc.). Your friends can subscribe to your feed of favorites and then they'll be notified each time you discover a great new song. For a really neat trick, add your Pandora favorites feed to the Mac OS X "RSS Visualizer" screensaver for a cool animated show of everything you're finding on pandora.
About the Beta: In addition to setting these feeds up so that they'll render nicely in your aggregator (with album art and so forth -- including CSS classes so you can customize till your heart's content), we're also using RSS 2.0 with namespaces to include a fair bit of metadata about the items as well. So if you want to know the Album or Artist name, it's in there and expressed in the musicbrainz.org "mm" namespace; if you want the iTunes or Amazon purchase URL's they're in there too in their respective namespaces. To cover the cases where no existing namespace would do, we've created a pandora namespace for additional information. For example, a URL that you can use to create a Pandora station from a song is delivered in the Pandora namespace.
Our use of existing namespaces is one area where I'm particularly interested in feedback during the beta period. Drop a note to pandora-support@pandora.com with "RSS Beta" in the subject line if you'd like to share your perspectives and feedback with us. I'm looking forward to talking with you about it. You are also invited to leave your comments here on the blog and we can have a conversation out in the open; that's always fine with us.
I'm really excited about this new dimension of Pandora; we'll certainly be adding more feeds over time (for example, a feed that captures all of your thumbs up/down feedback would surely be a great thing). It will be fun to see what the community does with all this.
* Known Issue: The top song, artist, and shared station feeds are being calculated from data that we're collecting starting today and they're updated on a daily basis. Expect that it will take 24 hours or so for these feeds to populate with items.
Posted by Tom Conrad at February 2, 2006 02:41 AM
Comments
Hi! Great new feature, but you forgot a feed:
A listener-specific feed of *what I'm currently listening to*.
Posted by: James McDugal at February 2, 2006 06:54 AM
Agreed! "What I'm currently listening to" would be nice.
Overall I'm VERY pleased at how Pandora has evolved over the last few months; I can't see why I won't be renewing my subscription when the time comes.
Posted by: CJ at February 2, 2006 10:41 AM
"You'll also be able to watch as the Pandora community's favorite songs, artists, and stations ebb and flow."
# Ebb :
# A period of decline or diminution: �Insistence upon rules of conduct marks the ebb of religious fervor� (Alfred North Whitehead).
Tom: i don't think you meant ebb! but we all know it was because you were listening to the great san francisco band, "the ebb and flow."
Posted by: analyst #54 at February 2, 2006 03:37 PM
Hey! It was late when I wrote this. Give me a break! Plus it seems to me that we'll surely see particular bands and songs "ebb" (yes, diminish over time) as we watch the feeds. Favorites come and they go.
Posted by: Tom Conrad at February 2, 2006 03:51 PM
I agree that a 'what i'm currently listening to' would be a nice feature
Posted by: kevin at February 2, 2006 07:43 PM
I'd like to add a third voice to those asking for a "what I'm currently listening to" feed. I can think of any number of other places I'd like to use that. And then you could have the "Current song" feed revert to a 'favorites page' link when the member isn't listening.
Posted by: Knight at February 3, 2006 04:38 PM
This is a very cool addition. Thank you.
Posted by: doc at February 7, 2006 07:17 AM
this is pretty zwsome stuff.haven,t heard anyting like it!
Posted by: robert at February 8, 2006 11:50 PM
Brilliant Idea Can't wait to share my feeds with my friends!!
Posted by: Ernesto at February 10, 2006 08:28 PM
Yeah I love To listen Just wish I could listen to it at my house, but I can't because I cannot hear it. So I listen to it ever time I work on something at school.
Posted by: Sarah Byrd at February 14, 2006 09:18 AM
+1 for "What I'm lestening to" feed.
=C=
Posted by: Cal Evans at February 16, 2006 11:33 AM
Request for "Last 10 Songs played" feed
Posted by: Indian Stallion at February 16, 2006 09:07 PM
you guys are doing wonderful things with Pandora, and the feeds are working proof. You have already jumped the perverbial wall that others are stuck behind when it comes to media players. I personally listen to Pandora over my Launch! subscription.
Posted by: Rob at February 17, 2006 12:32 AM
This thing is spreading like wildfire. I go to school in Ohio and everyone I've showed uses this over their own personal music collections. I haven't listened to my Winamp collection in months. I know this is all relatively new but has there been any progress in making this a widget?
Posted by: Chris at February 22, 2006 08:49 PM
Guys: great job!
I love it.
Suggestion: why not make a kind of XML feed for each station we create so wec put it inside itunes as a radio station?
Posted by: zohar at March 1, 2006 11:45 AM
What a great experience this is! On my blog you can find a movie called: loose change second edition. You can directly see it; I wonder if it's possible to share my musical prefs directly with the people that read it?
Posted by: Adri at March 9, 2006 01:13 AM
Hi...
Another vote for 'what I'm currently listening to'. I think it would be really great if it displayed the current station and then listed the current song playing or perhaps even a list of last 10 songs played....
I hope this feed becomes available soon. :)
Also, top 10 most played songs might be a nice option...
I am a new user and really like pandora alot and am (really) considering subscribing to the full service, but I would definitely want to have the option of what I am listening to...
Anyhow, overall I really like pandora and I appreciate the work that everyone has put into it. Thanks & kudos to everyone involved.
robin
Posted by: robin at March 30, 2006 10:51 AM
an album art url tag would be great, at the moment, i'm having to parse the content for it. I'm working on some very nice site widgets, i'll submit them when i have them nice. What i'm currently listening to would be very useful. As would a prieview button enclosed in the nasty table content. Might temp me to use it lol.
Posted by: Timmy Woo at July 16, 2006 10:02 PM
Another vote for "What I'm currently listening to"!
Posted by: charlie at February 15, 2007 03:31 PM
Here's another vote for the "what's I'm currently listening to" XML feed.
I want to mash it with Yahoo Pipes! to build some enhanced Pandora peripheral apps.
Posted by: Eric Atkins at July 3, 2007 08:01 PM
Yet another vote for "What I'm Listening to" feed!
Posted by: Charles Winterscheid at October 5, 2007 03:34 PM
When are you going to add a feed for what i'm currently listening to. This is long overdue.
Posted by: Justin at May 19, 2008 11:19 PM
I was stoked to find out Pandora offered some feeds, but....
You don't understand how long and hard I looked for a 'What I'm currently listening to' feed.
Any plans for this?
Posted by: chris christopherson at June 7, 2008 01:43 PM
