Pandora

OK, I've been meaning to share this service with others for a while and keep forgetting so I figured I'd say something about it here as it's being rather humourous this morning.

Pandora is a free music service that streams commercial-free music to your computer. What makes it extra cool is that you tell it a song or artist (or several) that you like, and it uses "music DNA" to compare that music to other stuff it its database that you may also like, and then plays songs you may not have otherwise heard. And it's free. It provides links to the Amazon.com and Itunes.com purchase points for each song (discretely, you have to click on the album cover to get to it). And you can have more than one "radio station" (I have rock/pop and mellow/new-age at the moment).

Now for the humourous part. I've told the thing I like Tori Amos, Michelle Branch, Evanescence, Savage Garden, Sting, and I can't remember who else in the Rock/Pop station. This morning it somehow decided that I must REALLY like 80s pop. As in it played three in a row from my early childhood (OK, elementary or middle school?) memories - Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, and Simple Minds. Not that I *dislike* any of those groups or even the particular songs (tho "Hungry Like A Wolf" just seems SOOOO dated). It just seemed rather odd to suddenly be transported back two decades.

As I was typing this it actually decided to return to the 21st century and played a Michelle Branch song ("Something to Sleep to") and now it's playing a song by Angela Ammons ("Walking Backwards") that I never would have heard without this service and I'm rather liking.

If you're reading this and want to hear what I'm listening to, I think you can search for my music by entering my email addresss. I'm registered on it using my dragonmama gmail account.