Pandora, which plays streaming music for free via a flash player on its site, is one of the first companies we profiled on TechCrunch, back in August 2005 during the original Bar Camp meetup. I still listen to it most of the time I’m writing blog entries.
Pandora continues to rack up new users (the current count is 4.5 million regular users, up from 1.8 million in May) and Pandora is now powering MSN radio through a deal signed last month.
Tonight Pandora is releasing a additional features aimed at increasing interaction among members. These social features include listener profiles with musical preferences, bio information, etc. (previously listeners had only a list of bookmarked songs), as well as listener search and lists of users who are fans of particular bands.
Download Pandora Songs
By the way, if you are really into Pandora, you can set up an application called Pandora’s Jar (see LifeHacker’s review here). Pandora’s Jar will save the current track playing in Pandora, and will optionally download bios, track stats, album art, and other info from last.fm as well.
Our previous coverage of Pandora is here.
Pandora is an awesome service. Takes me back to the days of Audio Galaxy (almost). I hope they continue to be succesfull.
Jaisen
Photagious
I agree. This is one “web2.0?” service I’ve seen people getting really hooked onto.
Even in Pandora’s current state, I still like Last.fm’s social capabilities better. And there’s always Pandora.fm if you want the mashup… my real question: when will something like Pandora’s recommendation service get fully integrated with iTunes? And when will iTunes get a subscription steaming music service like Yahoo or Rhapsody?
i LOVE pandora….also used last.fm
FYI, Pandora is an RIA built with OpenLaszlo…one of their showcase applications.
Finally…without social features, pandora was not anymore a so web 2.0 application…
Be social. All of all are going social.
Tech Tutorials: http://www.hotcoding.com
Pandora is pretty sweet, though I did find another streaming music site which I found to be better at picking your taste in music – slipping my memory right now though…
I have tried this service and it looks useful. However, when I try to register I am required to give a US ZIP code (I am based in the UK). Does anyone know a way around this aside from submitting a fake ZIP code?
Social features? Hmmm…well, aside from having a stray friend check out my bookmarked songs/artists for something new to listen to, I couldn’t care too much about them.
We already have a ton of “social trash” sites for everyone to whore themselves around on =)
The Pandora guys though, they are in it for the tunes, and the tunes alone. They’ve built a brilliant system that hardly ever lags, almost always plays stuff I wanna hear, and…is…FREE.
Go ahead, call me a Pandora poster child. I am, after all, wearing their T-Shirt today =)
If you want to plug into a Pandora listener community, check out
http://pandoras....crispynews.com
Thanks!
Tim (not founder!)
TechCrunch! – I really gotta say that promoting a method to steal music from Pandora is not good! If they don’t make money, this best of breed service is going to disappear and it will be loss for everyone. There are other wrappers that block the ads and such (a $36/year value), but outright ripping the songs is going a little too far don’t cha think!
Ugh. Guys, Pandora’s jar is *illegal* on the Pandora service. It violates ToS. This has been blogged about already. Not good to be pimping it.
Rich: Just look for ANY zip code in Google…
Al: I agree… not good to make a public mention of the illegal thingie…
I love Pandora, unlike last.fm it isn’t blocked here at work.
Compete through ReadWriteWeb has recently released some numbers on the explosive growth of social networking phenomenon…Pandora’s new strategy is spot on…but it will have competition from existing (and I can bet) a lot more new players.
http://www.jollyjo.org
Welcome to the Social Pandora.
unreal that you would include information in what was otherwise an informative and exciting development by Pandora by including a line that basically says “if you want to illegal download music that pandora offers up for free, use this”.
Pandora rocks.
I’ve used Last.fm extensively, but I’ve noticed that it almost *never* plays songs that are similar to the ones I entered. I found myself skipping tunes left and right.
Pandora, on the other hand, is correct in finding other music that I like about 95% of the time.
I read somewhere that this is due to the grouping algorithms is each service. Pandora associates songs based on technical characteristics like mood of music, orchestration, etc., while Last.fm associates them based on users’ tags or something. That adds much more subjectivity. My definition of “Ambient” might be completely different from someone else’s.
I’ll stick with Pandora.
http://www.seeqpod.com/music is a good combination of a few of my favorite music sites
The sad thing is, Pandora is not a music sharing service so to take music from it really sucks. They work hard on their DNA type system for music and its an amazing service. Don’t steal from Pandora.
Wonder when Mike will get the C&D and DCMA notice from Pandoras Tom Conrad 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1
Just in case you guys aren’t aware of how Pandora works. The Best Damn Tech Show, Period. has talked to Tim of Pandora a few times, and basically they pay to license the music streams, so any mashup or download of that music costs them directly. I mean there are tons of “file sharing” services out there, Pandora is not one of them. Pandora provides a really great experience to learn about new music.
I have to agree. Pandora’s Jar shouldn’t be linked to as an “add-on” service to Pandora. Everything isn’t free…nor should it be. TC should not advertise products which violate the ToS of any service they feature.
If web2.0 is about your right to do what you want without compensation for those behind the service…then it’ll only last as long as VC money is available or the VC’s themselves begin to notice..
Pandora is awesome, I listen to it everyday. I’ve discovered hundreds of new bands and ended up buying a lot of their CD’s. It’s definitely a great model for bands to be found
I had never heard of Pandora, and I see no reason why this site should ever be closed on your browser. I will probably just leave the music streaming at all times, plus it has all of the underground music I love so much too.
Wonderful.
Much respect to Pandora.
Finetune (www.finetune.com) has had the social aspect in the bag for a long time. Much better service than Pandora.
Looks like between last.fm, pandora, finetune and the rest, there will be a lot of heat in the broadband audio playground. I’d look for some consolidation soon. You can see it happening with Pandora an MSN already.
gonna try it once… i dont know about your support.
I agree, Pandora’s Jar should be taken out of this post.
I have been using Pandora for a few months now. There is always a plentiful selection of new music for me to discover, even though I listen to a lot of indie and obscure bands.
Last.fm forever!
Re UK and Zipcodes: Rich, my understanding is that Pandora has only licenses in the US under the communications act that covers Internet Radio. Thus, in countries such as the UK, they’ve got to license content from the labels.
Pandora Rocks ultimately and now with Social Networking its like BOOM BOOM… Wonderful… It’s been my favorite internet audio http://www.benh...rnet-music.html
I agree wholeheartedly with the major sentiment above. Why mention Pandora’s Jar when you could have mentioned PandoraFM – the latter begin a legit mashup which has been supported by both Pandora and last.fm?
Frankly, this is exactly the kind of thing the Digital Restriction Management gurus want. A demonstration of the “necessity” to constrain the barbarian hoardes. Nice going.
and apparently i can’t spell, “begin” = “being”.
Both services give serendipity a helping hand — I have discovered new bands that I probably would never have heard of otherwise. Suggestion engine technology is one of the more promising areas of interactive online media applications.
DHD
GeoActive Group USA
Pretty cool that they use the music genome project, but I’ll stick with mytuneslive.com
Doesn’t have the polish, the corporate backing but still the only site that lets me upload what I want to listen to, and put a flash player wherever I want.
Here is another client to download songs from Pandora.com
Just download and install the .NET framework,
and click and play. No advanced installation, everything handled automatically
http://stonedmo...stallation.html
cool!
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