Wow this is the kick up the ass they really needed to start competing with Last.fm.

I have used Pandora for a while but only recently signed up to last.fm. Being an avid music lover i loved the social and organisational aspects revolving around the music. The only problem… the radio really doesn’t do any justice whatsoever. It plays practically random music and the player is buggy and horrible.

Pandora however always had an amazingly easy to use player and on a plus side i can fire up a browser anywhere and be bopping away to music that sounds like “Daft Punk” or the like based on proper musical similarities. These new features are very wanted and although they look simple at this stage I really think Pandora is going to dominate this field. Good luck as well because they appear to be doing it for the love of music!

Keep up the good work…

This should please most of Pandora’s critics. Last.fm is nice, but I find Pandora better at proposing music that is not mainstream. Some real gems in there…

I would like a list of all the songs I’ve given a thumbs up, though.

Pandora really benefits from the fact that they don’t require a download - you are literally listening to new music within seconds of reaching their site!

However, like Jope, I’d really like a history feature once registered - plus the interface is not overly well designed.

Fantastic! I am also an avid Pandora user. I like the new features, though I would like for them to add an API too for those of us who would like to craft our own player and implement our own interface ideas. Possibly even build a community for alternate player styles for those of us who care to be able to switch…

And having access to all your information about your stations in HTML format when registered would be nice too (station - songs liked, songs disliked, description of attributes going into the station, etc).

I hope no one puts together a script the reads your favourite page and automatically searches for and downloads torrent files of those songs.

That would suck.

There’s another music recommendation service, named ‘Foafing the Music’.
Check it out!

http://foafing-the-music.iua.upf.edu

A couple of people have asked about the history feature on Pandora. If you choose the Edit this Station option (from the drop-down menu), you can see a list of songs that you gave a thumbs up to. Now they just need to add an Add to Favorites button.

Heh, the Pandora team has all options open to them, they will kick butt. From day one they had it together, easy UI and simple for users to get up and running. Also, Pandora’s DNA implementation bootstrapped them to a position where they can easily do not only the kind of neighbour clustering done by last.fm - and probably with more control for that matter - but also improve the listening and discovery experience in other ways.

And I agree Michael, there are a few APIs that would be awesome and I look forward to seeing what they come up with, there are probably a few good business opps there too I’d love to go to Pandora (or someone licensing Pandora’s engine) expressly with the idea of music shopping (i.e., compress the cycle into a 15 minute visit).

It’s interesting, in pre-Pandora days I was an early last.fm user and thought last were moving in a good direction. Despite last.fm’s server outages, difficult UI and quirky player I built up a profile there and hoped for the best for them. But I never had a smooth time there, and when my last.fm profile went missing and they couldn’t find it I lost interest.

BOTTOM LINE: Pandora’s a great listening and music discovery experience and their stability in all regards is admirable.

Mike D., thanks for the tip, that’s exactly what I needed…

A couple of more things I’ve seen while writing up a post today:

I miss a way to share my stations’ URLs outside the feeds, and without sending an email.

Also, I’d like a way to propose music for them to ‘Pandorize’? I think I’ll head to Pandora’s blog and ask. I’d like spanish music other than Julio iglesias in there…

When I first found Pandora I though it was a great idea, then couldn’t progress further.
It transpired that there are severe IP regulations that prevent Pandora from delivering their service to many countries, including Australia.
It’s a real pity - the suggestion mechanism worked really well for my musical tastes.

Why can’t Pandora and last.fm work together at all? This only makes sense to me… Pandora could have the option to submit played tracks to last.fm, and each could probably take advantage of the raw data the other has.

I would really like to see a stand-alone Pandora player or some way to create global hotkeys. I want to be able to pause my Pandora stations without having to leave the application I’m working in to hunt down the Pandora window.

Other than that, I just want more music!

There is stand-alone Pandora player called OPEN PANDORA. It has:
- Minimize to tray
- Show customized song details in the title bar and in the tray icon tooltip
- Send played song details to Microsoft Messenger

Try it: http://openpandora.googlepages.com/

Other than that, I just want more music!