A review of Pandora a WEB 2.0 application

Pandora.com is a radio station like no other. Unlike conventional radio stations that are broad casted through transmitters and then picked up by our radio receivers, Pandora exists purely through the web. When you arrive at the homepage of Pandora.com you are greeted with a text box and button called "Create". The idea here is for the user to input their personal flavour of music, whether that be a song title or a band name. Pandora will search for it and then create a station based on this preference.

It gets better, Pandora not only displays the album art, song title, band name, etc that we expect to see from programs such as iTunes, it will also line up several other song's to be of similar taste to what you are listening to, you can even name the radio station and save it to come back to whenever you like. This is beneficial for the user as they can now find music that they have never heard of before purely through recommendation. Even the band who's music is being broad casted benefits as the user can click on a drop down menu that gives you the option to 'Buy' the music. Pandora lets you choose from Amazon or iTunes and upon clicking on one of the links your web browser takes you directly to the sales page displaying the band's album/s available to buy. The drop down menu also alows the user to bookmark music into a list of favourites, you can also rate the music with a thumbs up to show your appreciation or a thumbs down if you dislike it in which case Pandora won't play you that tune again.

The thumbs form the genius behind Pandora, by rating every track that is presented to you Pandora will take elements from the songs you like by literally sampling pieces of your favourite music and finding similar matches. Eventually you will end up with a radio station that you will consider to be the best you've ever heard, and that's just the point. You can question Pandora as to why it has chosen to play a song from the drop down menu. Pandora will then give you an answer, for example when questioned as to why it was playing 'Cirrus' Pandora said "we're playing this track because it features electronica roots, a tight kick sound, acoustic drum samples, use of strings and prevalent use of groove".

So how does this work? Well, Pandora is run by an engine called 'The Genome Project', this engine uses over 400 attributes from a piece of music such as rhythm syncopation, key tonality and vocal harmonies and using complex mathematical algorithms it is able to match similar music styles and tastes.

Pandora is a brilliant idea that functions by the participation of the user with great usability and design, it is the epitome of Web 2.0. Pandora has grown over recent years, you can now use it on your phone via WAP, download it to your mp3 player or embed the application into a social network such as your 'Facebook' account and let your friends see what music your into and vice-versa.

Have ago at www.pandora.com and see what music you discover