Pandora's box

I've so far managed to avoid making this blog too geeky. Well, make that techno-geeky — we've had plenty of music-geeky and edu-geeky. And while it hasn't been terribly gear-geeky yet, that's more of an accident, really.

Anyway, I have a new friend online. Meet Pandora.

In a nutshell, it's a fully custom and "smart" (well, more on that later) online radio station. You start off by picking a band or song you like. I picked U2 for my first station. After the first song, it uses some sort of logic to pick songs it thinks are similar to your tastes. As the songs play, you can give them TiVo-esque thumbs-up and down ratings. Thumbs up tells the system to play more like it. Thumbs down immediately stops the song, apologizes for sullying your computer speakers with such tripe, and promises to never play that song again. Why this isn't already built into iTunes, I have no idea.

So far, it's been an interesting experience. We started off with 80s-era U2 (probably by random), traversed through some British pub-rock, and then somehow it went all hair band on me. The Scorpions and Humble Pie back to back?? Suspect. It might have all gone differently if it started with a newer U2 song, and I imagine as I listen more it'll get better at guessing. Maybe. Regardless, with a free account you can set up 100 stations and switch between them at will, all with different criteria. Maybe we should all start a holiday playlist with "Grandma Got Run-over by a Reindeer?"