I was speaking with an acquaintance the other day, comparing iPhone apps, and I said: “I assume you have Pandora?”.  After he said “no, what is Pandora?” and me removing foot from mouth and jaw from floor,  I thought I would write this post.  I was surprised that someone as technology forward to purchase the iPhone had not downloaded one of the two most downloaded apps in the app store (the other being Facebook).  So I proceeded to tell my friend about Pandora.  To make a long story short, he emails me the next day saying something to the effect that, Pandora was the coolest app ever!!

So, for those who actually don’t know what Pandora is, here is as brief an overview as I can give.  It is an online music service that allows you to stream music over the web.  You can stream it to your web browser or Smart phone as well as other Internet listening devices.  What is interesting about Pandora is it is based on the Music Genome Project.  So what is that?  Basically, they have music analysts who analyze over 400 distinct music qualities of every song and try to match those with qualities of similar songs.  So, what does that mean to you?  You can create custom stations in Pandora based on an Artist, Album, Genre, or even a Song.  So, if you like Led Zeppelin, you can create a Led Zeppelin station.  Pandora will use its analysis to find other artists that sound like Led Zeppelin and create a customized playlist for you and really help you discover music you perhaps have not heard before and enjoy music you already love. So, in creating a “Led Zeppelin” Station, you will likely be playing music from Cream, The Doors, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Guess Who, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Etc.  It won’t just play songs from the same era, they will try to actually match musical qualities of the music itself.  Pretty Cool Stuff!

Pandora also has an integrated rating system for your personal use.  If you like a song, you can give it a thumbs up or down.  If you give it a thumbs up, that song will play more often in your customized playlist.  Give it a thumbs down, and you guessed it, you won’t hear it again on that particular station.  You can have up to 100 Pandora stations in your account.

There are two types of subscription models, one is almost free and the other is paid.  The “almost free” model is free up until you hit 40 hours of monthly use.  Then the music will stop unless you want to pay $.99 to get unlimited use for the rest of the calendar month.  If you decline to pay, you just need to wait until the first of the next month and you get another 40 hours.  Other limitations include: a one-hour timeout limit, a song-skip limit of 6 per hour and 12 per day.

You can elect to upgrade your subscription to what they call Pandora One and it is a paltry $36/year .  This allows you many features that the free option does not.  You get unlimited listening, no advertisements, higher quality audio, more song skips (6 per hour and unlimited per day), access to the desktop application, access to the Pandora mini tuner (a smaller web-browser based form factor), and a five-hour time out interval.

There are many social networking integration options with Pandora, you can directly tweet about songs currently playing, share songs on Facebook, email songs or stations, and you can share songs or stations with friends.  It has a very tight integration with Facebook so that users can click on “Friends Music” and it will give you a list of every friend in Facebook that uses Pandora and it will show you their most recent stations and their favorite songs.  So, if you go to Account>Sharing, you have some options on how you share the songs and stations in both Twitter and Facebook.  I am not sure what the default is, but you can block Pandora from sharing your songs and stations from your friends and hide the embarrassment of the fact that you are an avid Menudo fan.  (Yes, that’s Ricky Martin in the Yellow Shirt).

Pandora has some amazing options for mobile users.  Pandora supports iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre/Pixi, and Windows Mobile.  Pandora also has a really sweet iPad application as well.   There are probably hundreds of other listening options out there that I am not aware of, some I am. Sonos has a Pandora option, Chumby has one,Sony Dash (which is based on Chumby and I will review it when I get mine next week!!) has a Pandora app, and many Blu-Ray players that have Internet connections now have Pandora apps built in.

Why I love this service so much is that I can discover new music and have an unlimited and unknown upcoming shuffle of the music I like.  I use it on my iPhone constantly, although it is a bit of a battery drain I am sorry to say.  I have stations based on Bob Marley, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead.  I also have stations based on classical composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Bach.  Finally, discovering new music off bands like The Killers, Muse, Radiohead, Keane and Incubus are keeping things current for me.  I have yet to ever reach the 40 hours per month and frankly, at $2/month, Pandora One is a steal!  If you have not yet discovered Pandora, please check it out, you wont be sorry.