Pandora's wild ride -- via @NYTimes [Quote]
Some music lovers dislike Pandora’s approach to choosing music based on its characteristics rather than cultural associations. Slacker Radio, a competitor with three times as many songs but less than a third of Pandora’s listeners, takes a different approach. A ’90s alternative station should be informed by Seattle grunge, said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president for marketing at Slacker. “It’s not just that this has an 80-beat-a-minute guitar riff,” he said. “It’s that this band toured with Eddie Vedder.”
The New York Times story offers a good history of Pandora. Definitely worth a read.
The streaming music concept is not new, but the ubiquity of web-connected mobile devices has given the companies that provide streaming music an opportunity to vie for the number one spot in a niche market that will only continue grow as the 21st century progresses.
As I have probably said on this site before, I'm a longtime Pandora user and I often enjoy the results of their music genome analysis The Music Genome Project catalogs the myriad traits shared by various songs and artists, like pop sensibility, piano as the main instrument, and male singer (one result here would be Ben Folds), and finds songs and artists that share the traits of the song or artist you first searched for to create your station.
The song choices Pandora serves up are usually somewhat more homogeneous than those of competitors, but that is why I use Pandora: when I want to be confident that the kind of music they are giving me is just the kind of music I want to hear. For example, when I'm studying I'll take Pandora over competitors for the consistency. Predictability has its place in my listening preferences.
Sometimes.
Other times, I use my new Slacker Radio account. Slacker offers a human element. Although you can create stations from artists you search for, Slacker employs human DJs to develop both pre-made playlists and how the playlist looks when you make your own station. This promises a more traditional listening experience and has its own unique sort of consistency.
Slacker also lets you fine-tune how "out of the box" your station will be, by allowing you to ask it for more popular or more fringe choices. This makes it a better way, in my opinion, to discover music you really like but may not have otherwise learned about. Their menu of pre-made stations is also handy, serving up the standard genres and even a station for the "popular hits" of the current era.
The good thing is that both services offer an app for webOS, so I use both on my Palm Pre almost daily.
Try Pandora...
...and Slacker Radio:
