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.