pandora

www.pandora.com is a great little place for free music to listen to while you are web-surfing, working on homework assignments, or just about anything else you might be doing while sitting at your computer (or crank it and use it as a radio while you go about your housework). you create "radio stations" and can create up to 12 (?) channels. how you start is to choose a particular musical artist or song. the musical genome project then recognizes certain attributes of the music and searches its database for music that matches some/all of those attributes. it chooses a song and begins to play it. if you listen and like it you give it the thumbs up. it will continue to play and will be added to your playlist for that particular channel. if you give it the thumbs down it will skip to the next song. once you create more channels you can toggle between them as you will, or you can choose to have them all mixed up with random selections from your channels.

If you want to learn more about a particular song or artist, you click on what you want to know more about about and it takes you to the data. When was the song made and was is its musically historical context in the artists' careers. It also tells you which album it's on.

another desirable thing about pandora.com is that there are NO COMMERCIALS! and NO CHARGE.

Not sure who owns or sponsors pandora.com, but I'm sure that the links to where you can purchase the music if you want to could have something to do with this website being made available. Their might be cookies that spy embedded -- just a guess!-- but if you have a firewall it shouldn't be a problem.

Check it out.
www.pandora.com

p.s. click on title to take you to where i found the groovy picture of pandora!