Open The Box
According to the Greeks, Pandora was the first woman and a punishment against mankind for the enlightenment of Prometheus. This lady came with many gifts from the gods, but the most notable was the pithos, the jar holding all of the evils of the world. In short, curiosity inspired Pandora to open this jar, which she was told never to unseal. When she did so, all of these evils were unleashed upon the world. The same could be said for my playlist on the Pandora Internet Radio station. ComputerShopper [link] recently did a write up on this buzzword entrepreneurs are spreading all over the internet, "Web 2.0." Web 2.0 sites are websites that use new web development technology to allow the user to control or create the content.
With Pandora, the user types the name of an artist or song title he or she is interested in, and the service immediately begins streaming related music. You can save and share these stations with other people. More than the other write-ups, this interested me. The first thing I typed was "Dark Funeral," a Black Metal band from Sweden. The first track was by Dark Funeral, and then the station served up some Vader (Polish Death Metal), Slayer (classic American Thrash) and more Dark Funeral. While I enjoyed this selection, I'd anticipated more Scandinavian Black Metal before hearing a band like Vader. A couple of bands I had not previously heard, but enjoyed quite a bit, like The Duskfall and Searing I played. Some other bands such as Exodus and Sodom were played, and I skipped through a bit of the monotonous selections that came afterward. I was delighted to see a live Deicide tracks appear, though. Unfortunately, after the Deicide track, I was prompted to join for unlimited listening. It seems that the initial offering is a trial. While I was very disappointed by this, they do have to make a living somehow. Streaming bandwidth isn't free.
I have, however, found myself curious as to how this system works. I could imagine a large collection of mp3s attached to metadata (perhaps in an ID3 field inside of the file) that looks for likely pairs of keywords and assembles a playlist according to relative similarities.
All in all, I'm not sure what to think. The service does its job pretty well and seems to have a very large selection ranging from the relatively obscure to the outright mainstream. I'm not so sure I find this worth paying for, though. While it does have advantages over standard streaming radio, semi-choice, for instance, its a hard sell to make.