I’m not an expert Pandora user. I only discovered it this year, and I haven’t remotely finished plumbing the feature set. Mostly I just create new stations when I remember a particular artist or song I love and leave it at that. That’s one of the great things about Pandora. You can be a casual user and still thoroughly enjoy the service.
Last week, however, Michael Arrington and I got an email from the Pandora folks: Seems they’ve gone and made the service more Web 2.0’ish. Now you can find shared stations within the Pandora community, see who is listening to what, and search for songs, stations and listener profiles by keyword.
The original, innovative idea behind Pandora is music discovery, and the fact that you can do things like seed stations with specific music to discover similar works is a great one. While the latest features still clearly fall under that concept, there is also something else going on here. Check out this quote from Pandora’s blog:
Find other Pandora listeners that share your musical tastes, hometown, school, or place of work. Explore their favorite songs and artists, listen to their stations, and leave them comments. Even bookmark them so you can check what they’re into later.
Once you add in elements like “hometown” and “school,” Pandora suddenly starts to sound a lot more like MySpace or Facebook to me. And indeed, I’ve heard from a lot of companies lately suggesting that the next wave of social networking sites will be based around specific interests. Vertical social networks.
So is Pandora the new, cooler MySpace?
I have tried pandora and while I think it is good I like last.fm a lot better. You can use plug-ins for the music you listen to on your computer or on your iPod and it gives you recommendations of music to check out based on what people who listen to the same things that you listen to. You can also set radio stations for artists you like, genres you like, or the music that gets recommended to you.