This week, I have a guest writer, my daughter, Tracey. She enjoys music and writing, so I invited her to blog about her recent discover of Pandora. It’s been around a number of years, but recently discovered by her. Enjoy!

A couple weeks ago as I was surfing the internet, I was using the Stumble Upon internet tool bar and “stumbled upon” an internet radio station called Pandora. I had no idea what it was but I was

interested in exploring. I was in the mood for some Gaelic Storm so I typed into the search box the band’s name and it started playing Celtic music. After listening to a couple songs, I was beginning to wonder when I would hear a song by Gaelic Storm. At the time it was just playing songs from bands similar to Gaelic Storm. I wasn’t happy that I wasn’t getting my Gaelic Storm, so I left the site and stumbled somewhere else. But, this wasn’t the end of Pandora for me. I returned to Pandora again and made another venture into the music. This time, I tried The Beatles as I am also an oldie’s fan. With this station, I can hear songs from Elton John, The Monkees, Paul McCartney, Queen, CCR, Led Zeppelin, The Who and every once in a while a Beatles song will play.

What exactly is Pandora though? It is, as I said, an internet radio site but there’s something different about it. Pandora has a music genome project, where their team listens and sorts through hundreds of songs of bands old and new, and studies the musical details and groups together with styles of rhythm or vocals or lyrics that are similar to each other and that becomes your station. You can make as many stations as you want. If you have iTunes with the Genius feature, Pandora is like one big music library that runs the Genius feature all the time.

Pandora can also be used on your phone – they have a trial feature. If you really like Pandora, there are ways to listen at home without your computer. You will need to get a gadget to do that. The free version has ads and there is a fee-based service where you will see no ads.

If you’re open to music for background noise and don’t care too much about what song plays, Pandora is your cup of tea. If you want just songs from a certain band, you’d have more luck just popping in a CD or buying the album from iTunes, Amazon or Rhapsody.

My mom blogged about Slacker – another free and cool radio station. She says she likes the Pandora interface better, it’s prettier and doesn’t have the loud commercials like Slacker does.