Like a good Vegas stand, I'm all in. This past week I was introduced to a nifty little website called Pandora. It is in a nutshell your iTunes player on shuffle but with extra cool songs worth discovering thrown in here and there (or everywhere if you're musically green). Right now it's kicking the butt of my radio and internet radio, and I'm wondering if this new avenue will make purchasing mp3s obsolete.



First, how it works: when you go to the site, it asks you to pick an artist you like. I started with Radiohead. What it then does is configure a playlist based on Radiohead and bands that sound like Radiohead. This had me going for a few hours, until a band I'd not given much consideration to before popped up and there played a song I found catchy. So I took that band and started a new channel with them and, viola! A whole bunch of new artists I've either never heard of before or never given much consideration to began to play, one after one, and I found myself hopping on iTunes thinking, 'man, I've got to buy this!' and 'man, I've GOT to buy that!' After two days I discovered the best benefit of using Pandora.com, which was that it is the easiest way to discover new music FOR FREE.

I put this in all caps because back in the day we had Warehouse Music, where you could go and listen to CDs before you bought them. And when they went out of business there was still Tower Records, which for me was the all-time best place to find great indie bands before they hit it big (you know, before Myspace came along and destroyed them by giving every band a page, thus eliminating the need to put out a record at all in some instances). Rhapsody had a brilliant platform because you could pay a small subscription fee and have access to an infinite number of songs and artists, but with Rhapsody you still have to sort of know who and what you're looking for. The Yahoo radio was a nice concept, but where Pandora excels is in the fact that it sticks to the genre and general sonic qualities of a particular song or artist when it crawls out to deliver a playlist for you. Add to that a really nice feature that lets you synch up with friends and share playlists, and you're suddenly listening to great stuff you'd have to get out to a swanky cocktail party to discover. For what it's worth, they've got me sold.

Check Pandora out.

Story by Simbarashe

Starpulse contributing writer