I looked at Pandora more than a year ago when it just launched but I stopped using it since you were required to pay a yearly subscription fee to continue listening beyond the initial free hours. I liked the idea a lot though. They have a huge catalog of tagged music and are able to select songs for you based on your taste and preferences. This can be done in several ways, you start off by providing a number of artists or albums that you really like and Pandora starts playing immediately. As you listen to it, you can give each individual song a thumbs up or thumbs down, or just let it slide by. All this influences the decision-making process for the next songs. In the end you create your own personal radio station. You can configure up to 100 of these, which means that you can easily set up different ones and listen to them depending on your current mood. A QuickMix feature also makes it possible to get more variety since it will mix all your radio stations on-the-fly as some kind of über-station-with-stuff-you-like.

I recently decided to take a look at it again and noticed that they switched to a banner-based income model with a subscription for those that don't wont to see any advertising. This is awesome, since for all intents and purposes, Pandora is now free to use. Additionally, it they have increased the audio quality of all their music to 128Kbps which makes it sound great!

Pandora is also spot on with the Web 2.0 community approach since you can share your radio stations. Feel free to listen to G.Bevin's Radio. Note that this will not play what I'm currently listening to, it will select music for you based on my musical taste.

I'm using it with the MacOSX DeskBrowse utility, which neatly slides away into the side of the screen. Most of the time, Pandora is invisible and I only slide it in to give my appreciation of the music that is playing.

I'm curious to see if Pandora will replace my preferred internet radio station, Radio Paradise, or if the computer-mixed radio program will start to bore me. I'm planning on using it for at least a few days to see how it goes ...