No Load Music - I'm in heaven

A friend of ours, Tom Conrad, is CTO of an awesome company called Pandora. They just came out with a free service and if you spend any time at the computer, you’ll have a blast with it. www.pandora.com is connected up with the Music Genome project and will “match” artists or songs for you. Do you have an artist whose work you like? Would you love to find more music like it but, unfortunately, since you’re no longer 14 and have a life, you have no time for it? Tired of ads on the radio and not impressed with the creeping elevator-musicness of the digital channels??? Go to Pandora, sign up, and then create a station. Pandora will match music to your station for you. You cannot dictate the music or hear songs again (their licensing precludes it) but it’s pretty darn fun. My favorites are Pat Metheny, Jason Mraz, Fairport Convention (no kidding. I hadn’t listened to their music for about 12 years, but the stuff Pandora matches to it are very cool), and I also like the Arlo Guthrie channel too! At any rate, you can create a station and then Pandora will just throw other music at you for as long as you wish. I’ve also used it for finding out how bands sound. Jason Mraz was mentioned in the Chronicle. The kids were lining up for him. So I typed him in – hey, I like it! Very exciting. I’m no longer stuck listening to old XTC and Pink Floyd albums. I can be … modern! J Probably the coolest thing about this service is that it plays the one or two songs off an album that you really like – and you don’t have to stack up CD’s in your closet. Freedom! Now if they would only do this with clothing… Here's a nice post about Pandora from

www.transmit.net

and another one from Dave Hornick's ventureblog. I wish these guys great good luck and am impatiently waiting for the jazz section to sort itself out.