Over the holiday, I wrote about a social networking music site called Last FM which lets you share and listen to music via friends and accquantances with the same tastes - but hopefully new artists. I wasn’t as impressed as I could have been, but now I have found a “simliar music” site that I am impressed with, called Pandora.

I first heard about Pandora while on a call with a collegue, and on my first try, Pandora was down and I couldn’t play with it. I forgot about it for the requisite few weeks until Inside the Net featured an interview with Tim Westegren, of both the Music Genome Project and Pandora. The interview explained how the MGP is the “back end” of Pandora, and the company has teams of musicians analyzing songs to break them down to their base components - essentially their “DNA” - in order to find like songs that people like.

I went back to Pandora after listening to the interview (and if you’re not listenign to Inside the Net, you should be) and played around with the site. What I saw was really exciting - particularly if you like music, like listening to new music and yet lack the time to do so. I plugged in the name of a much-loved but not mainstream DC band, and Pandora created a radio station for me. Approximately 25% of the songs played based on the information Pandora had about my favorite band was the band itself - another 25% were other bands I had heard of. The most exciting part for me is that about 50% of the songs were bands that I’d never heard of, or have heard about but not gotten around to listening to yet.

On the monetization side, Pandora is beginning to take advertisers (though they have a $36/year subscription that gets the ads off the player) and is compatible with both Amazon and iTunes - users can click the album cover and buy either the full album from Amazon, or individual songs from iTunes.