WOW.

Pandora came across my clickstream awhile ago. I visited the site briefly, but didn’t stay for long. On a colleague’s urging, I finally went back to it last night. Wow. Amazing. Cool.

It is the closest thing I’ve used online that reads my mind. I think a song and it plays it. Always adapting, changing and recommending. All wrapped into an affiliate model that gently reminds me that I can buy the song on iTunes or grab the whole album from Amazon.

Its free to use (short trial period at first), with ads interfering a little after your trial period expires. At that point you can pay for a year (about $30) or do a month to month. Either way it is worth more than the price of admission.

It has a nice little flash interface, that can travel with you. For Firefox users, it is a function already built into FoxyTunes. So you don’t even need to visit pandora.com to use it. You can email your station to friends, look at the top stations that other users have created, or look up a friend’s stations simply by adding their email address into a search box. They have about 400,000 songs in their database now and are sure to be adding more as time goes on.
A quick look through Digg.com will net you a hack that even allows you to rip the music you hear to your computer as an mp3, although it looks like its a daily fight between the hackers and Pandora to stop this kind of behavior.

All in all, Pandora is taking the long tail of music and stretching it even further. When was the last time your favorite radio station played music that you like based on the collective world’s (read: Pandora users) tastes.

check it out.

Technorati Tags: pandora, longtail, music