A few years ago, I was happily snurfing (surfing the web while you are talking on the phone) at my local community college between classes when I stumbled upon an ad for Pandora: radio from the Music Genome Project. Seeing how I like to look things up on the web and “have a knack for those kinds of things” as a friend says who also claims that I can find anything out via the web, ha, I explored it.

Pandora once described itself as “your own personal DJ.” Though I was a little cynical about the whole idea since I am very picky about my musical tastes, I decided to give it a try.

Given that it asks for VERY little information from you besides what your birth date (for explicit lyrical purposes), e-mail address (as your login) and a password (for that site) it didn’t seem to want too much from me from there. Once I logged in, I was to type in a name of a song for artist that I liked. For example, ‘Electric Head Part 2’ (by White Zombie) is one my ‘stations’ that I have. When you do a search it creates what is called a ‘station’ which plays similar artists and songs to that of what you typed in. Another ‘station’ I have is Evanescence. Through this ‘station’ I have found bands like Lacuna Coil, Nightwish, Epica, In Tenebris, Fireflight, Paradise Lost, Plumb, Octavia Sperati, Battlelore, Naio Ssaion, Benjamin Gate, Skillet, Disciple and Sirenia.

When you create a station and a song is played you have several options. You can give it thumbs up to play more music like this or give it thumbs down to not ever play it again. It will play ANY band that is similar to what you give thumbs up to. Popular or not; the point of Pandora is to find new songs and artists for you to listen to. Since the music is streaming via Flash there is nothing to download and it is free to use and listen to with no additional software required. Stations are limited to 100 (that’s a lot of music) and you can not rewind music. You can not demand music to be play instantly. You can only listen to so many songs per hour per station. So if you run out of music on one station for that hour, you can always move to another station. The point of Pandora is to introduce you to new music through your tastes and inputs to songs being played; not to be your personal iTunes library.

If you are not a fan of main stream music or just looking for new bands to listen to, then this is the place for you! You can listen to this at any computer anytime. There is also an option of bookmarking favorite songs for reference or buying from Amazon or iTunes.

I absolutely love this website and its service for music lovers and listen to it more often than I should. (It’s constantly on at work.) I recommend it to anyone who is looking to broaden their musical library or just looking for their own personal DJ.

Give Pandora a try: www.pandora.com