21st Century Jukebox

I love living in the 21st century. And I love listening to music! 🙂

Pandora is a web 2.0 music service (available for free or with a subscription to remove visual web ads) that gives me a superb reason to not listen to my own iTunes music library constantly. Visit the site and start creating your own custom music radio station(s), adding the names of musical groups you like or specific songs. You can add as many as you want, and Pandora streams music similar to the groups and songs you have entered on your own music channel.

All commercial free. (There are ads on the website, but not any audio commercials in the musical stream.)

As you listen to songs, you can click GUIDE ME and indicate whether or not you like that song. This information is fed into the Pandora intelligence engine and used to select new songs for your radio station. This is similar to the new feature of iTunes which shows you related commercial music in the iTunes music store as you browse your own music library.

Big difference: Pandora is 100% free. Of course the music is STREAMING to your computer (this is Internet radio for web 2.0, after all) so you can’t readily download the music to your hard drive. Still, it is an awesome way to discover new tunes by groups you like, and similar music (at least according to the Pandora AI engine.)

I added about 15 musical groups I like that are all 80s rock / progressive rock bands. Use this link to listen to my Pandora radio station! When listening to a group, the Pandora site offers (of course) one-click access to purchase songs from either iTunes or Amazon. You can also skip to the next song like you would using an iPod or CD player. If you indicate you don’t like a song, Pandora automatically quits playing that song and skips to the next one. Pandora also lets you create a list of favorite songs, which you can share with others.

As if web 2.0 technologies and services like Netflix were not revolutionizing my personal media consumption enough, now we have Pandora… what will be next? We live in a great millennium!

Thanks to Christopher Harris for posting about Pandora! David Pogue reports that in March, the Squeezebox music player will connect into Pandora. Very cool!

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On this day..

• 10 Days till EdCampOKC 2017: March 4, 2017 at Del City High School – 2017
• iPad Video App Smash: Auphonic, Voice Record Pro and Green Screen – 2016
• Presentations on Creativity, 3D Printing, Digital Sharing and More – 2016
• Audio Podcasting with iOS and YouTube – 2015
• Sleet Sledding: The Movie (fun with iMovie for iPhone Trailers) – 2013
• Narrate a SlideShow with ShowMe – 2012
• Create a Narrated Slideshow with ShowMe for iPad – 2012
• Marzano Causal Teacher Evaluation Model by Robert La Grassa – 2012
• Lessons Learned from Finger Puppet Theater on Vimeo – 2011
• 5th Grade Colonial Living History Museum – 2011