Free streaming music from Pandora

I’ve been playing with Pandora, a streaming music service, to play music and share it with friends. I listen a lot in work and get bored of my collection – Pandora helps me to find new artists and albums by playing music similar to my tastes.

On the homepage is a small flash application. You start by telling it an artist or song, say Alicia Keys, and it plays music that reflects this artists style. You can change the music it puts into the mix by saying that you like or dislike a track it plays or adding an artist into your personal music station. If you hear something you’d like then you can add it to your favourites page; alternatively it provides links to ITunes and Amazon. If you want to share your personal music station with your friends then you can do so: for example to hear a mix of music that I seeded with Coldplay and James Blunt click here.

The blog has some nice information about the Music Genome Project where Pandora are classifying music by hand to form a taxonomy. Presumably the IP is a key ingredient in their business model but it would be brilliant if they could publish this in some way. In a similar vein some people have already asked for tagging. From a navigation perspective I’d like to see the capability used in news.com where you can graphically navigate around a topic area as a set of linked nodes: It was developed by LivePlasma.

Finally, it would be great if you could play more than one track by an artist or go back and replay an artist in your stream. According to their blog, they can’t allow this due to limitations in the licensing.

Anyway, this is a brilliant site and I’m really impressed with the implementation – I’m almost loathe to tell anyone about it! Anyone know of any other good music services in a similar vein?