New Pandora Music Service

Clint Goss posted this on the flute email list, and it's a great way to create your own custom online music radio. It's called Pandora. If you like to listen to music at work (or home), then you simply create a new "radio station" by telling it what artists you like. It will then start streaming music to your computer. As the music plays, you can give each song a "thumbs up" or a "thumbs down" to tell it that you like or don't like the song playing. A thumbs up will keep the song in rotation and help the service locate other songs/music like the one you liked. A thumbs down removes the song from rotation and discourages the service from playing similar songs. Two thumbs down to the same artist and they are 'banned' from your 'radio station'.

I've created a couple sample radio stations to test it. Here's the Radio Stations which I created and the behavior of the selected tunes. Note that selecting an artist doesn't necessarily play all of the songs from their album(s). The first song it plays is from the selected artist, then it begins to play related music.

For example: I started with "Mary Youngblood" and it played the first song from her album: "Feed the Fire". The following songs it chose to play were from a more folk, vocal, guitar genre, not Native American Music. Not exactly what I wanted.
The second example I chose was R. Carlos Nakai. This choice seemed to produce a station with Native American Flute music in the likes of Robert Tree Cody
Choosing "Peter Kater" created a station of new age piano music including David Lanz, Jim Brickman, etc.
If you want to try a different path, you can select from their Genre list for a different variety of music.

Here's the link: http://www.pandora.com/

I haven't been listening long, but I already like it. You are required to create an account after a short period of listening, but it's free. You do have to provide your birth year, zip code and gender when registering, but this is used to target the advertising which plays at the bottom of the website (I clipped it from my screenshot above, I didn't want to advertise for them....)

Looks like you can also pay a $36 per year fee to get it without the advertising.

For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(music_service)

If you discover some interesting radio station, post a comment with the artist(s) which you selected.