Score a Backstage Pass at Pandora!

Just days ago I was telling you to check out Pandora.com, what I con­sider to be one of the trea­sures of the Inter­net. The amaz­ing music site has since updated its inter­face, mak­ing it even more fun use. First, Pan­dora made it eas­ier to give songs the thumb up or down, the fea­ture that helps you shape your per­sonal radio sta­tions. Now this fea­ture is part of the main page. They also changed the way in which favorites oper­ates. It is now under the cat­e­gory of book­marks. More impor­tantly you can now book­mark both songs and artists, thereby cre­at­ing your own per­sonal ref­er­ence library. Why would you want this? Well, if you are any­thing like me, you find it damn near impos­si­ble to remem­ber the names of new bands, songs, or albums you like when you need to. (IE, “What do you want for your birth­day?”) This fea­ture cre­ates of record of what you enjoy, pos­si­bly why you enjoy it, and elim­i­nates the need to remem­ber it all. This new fea­ture is part of Pan­dora Back­stage, an enhanced sec­tion of the site. In addi­tion to book­mark­ing, the Pan­dora Back­stage site also offers the abil­ity to eas­ily find songs with sim­i­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics to the songs you tell Pan­dora you enjoy. By click­ing on back­stage song but­ton you get a list­ing of the char­ac­ter­is­tics asso­ci­ated with that par­tic­u­lar song, and a list­ing of other songs with the same char­ac­ter­is­tics. The results can be eerily insight­ful. For exam­ple, I gave the thumbs up to a Nir­vana song, “All Apolo­gies,” and then clicked on the book­mark song but­ton. In the songs with sim­i­lar qual­i­ties was a song by the lesser known band Jaw­breaker, one of my old favorites, and a song by Arc­tic Mon­keys, a band my nephew recently rec­om­mended to me. I was impressed to say the least. Not only will it point you to these artists, bet­ter still you can lis­ten to sam­ples of the songs and artists that are listed, allow­ing you to fur­ther cus­tomize your user expe­ri­ence. Want to learn more about a per­former? Pan­dora Back­stage has that cov­ered too. You can obtain great infor­ma­tion about artists by click­ing on the artist but­ton or using the great new search sec­tion. Both will lead you to insight­ful infor­ma­tion, links to influ­ences and sim­i­lar per­form­ers, and a discog­ra­phy for the artist. The once remark­able Pan­dora, is now even more remark­able. So much good stuff you have to check it out for yourself.

Pan­dora: Wel­come Backstage