Open the Box

A friend recently forwarded something interesting to me. I think it's fairly new because in the past two days, two people who don't know each other and most likely have no mutual friends both emailed me about it.

It's called Pandora. The possibilities with marketing for this thing are ginormous, but for now, the important thing is that it's like a personlized internet radio application. And, you can skip ahead, choose to go directly to iTunes to buy the song, or go directly to Amazon to buy the album.

The basic idea is that you give it a song or an artist/band to search for. Then it (usually) first plays a song from that artist or the song you typed in. After that, it will play several songs in (in their entirety) that are related to the original artist or song you entered. The really cool thing is that it saves all of these initial searches as 'radio stations'. As each song is playing, you can click on it, and there are some options. You can say "I don't like it," which I'm assuming means it won't be included the next time you play that station (and it will then skip to the next song). Or you can say "I like it," which is probably used as some sort of fail-safe to make sure the music suggestions are all relevant. That menu is where you can choose to buy the song or the album from outside sites. Plus you can save the song to a favorites list which is always accessible and available to print.

After the first few searches, Pandora will ask you to register to go further. It's totally free, and appears to be a non-intrusive registration. All it asks you for is your email address, a password, your zipcode, and that's it. You can also choose if you want them to send you any informational emails or not.

So far, I've made about sixty of my own 'radio stations' that span soul, latin jazz, hip hop, electro, disco, avant-weirdness, glam, folk, pop, dirty rock n roll, punk rock, older garage, trashy blues, death metal, alt-country, traditional country, and damn near anything else you can think of. I'm lovin' it so far.

Check out Pandora. You'll be glad you opened the box.