Pandora

Pandora is a streaming music provider. They claim that they "play music you'll love - and nothing else." And they are not liars, that's what they do. Pandora started back in 2000 with their Music Genome Project. The idea was to both categorize and organize all of the music that you could possibly listen to. They have spent years now setting up a system that allows the creation of custom channels of music that sound alike. This allows a person to choose an artist, song or album that they like and hear music by the same artist or similar sounding. In addition to being able to select the starting point, a user can mark a "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" to any song while it's playing to hear or not hear things like it again. In addition to the simple music playing possibilities, users of Pandora can share their custom stations with their friends and find people who like the same types of music as they do using the Share and Find features built right into the player. There are not many other players that even compete with Pandora out there in the US. This could be considered similar to Live365 or Napster but Pandora plays mainstream as well as more independent music at the same time. One can listen to both The Hush Sound (a lesser known band) and Weezer in the same stream. While Pandora could do a little better on the social networking aspect of it (if this is the direction they'd like to head), as a streaming music player and introducer to new music, they take the cake. Pandora has a very clean, easy-to-use interface about it. One can use Pandora without even signing up for the service but signing up allows users to save their favorite stations and keep track of what they have listened to. With controls similar to iTunes or Winamp, the learning curve for Pandora is very quick. A play, rewind and fast forward button are the norm. In addition, there are two extra buttons, "Thumbs Up" and "Thumbs Down", which allow you to rate music you listen to. Clicking "Thumbs Down" will mark the music as not what you are looking for and move on to the next song. Signing up for Pandora is as easy as providing an email, password, birth year, zip code and sex. Birth year is to make sure you're over 13 (as the US requires this), zip code to make sure you're in the US since Pandora can currently only be played while in the US and the gender is used to help direct ads to you based on your sex. Pandora is free to use. They do offer a $36/year subscription service which gets rid of all of the advertisements on the site and allows you to stream music to certain Sprint cell phones and home theater systems. Pandora is great for almost anyone that loves to listen to music. One of the biggest downsides is that it is currently only available in the US (due to licensing issues). As long as you live inside the US and love music, Pandora can not only play music you already know but also introduce you to new artists and songs that will most likely interest you.