Pandora Radio

We’ve long been fans of Pandora on the computer. So we’re practically delirious that this custom Internet radio service is available gratis on the iPhone.

And Pandora is better than ever, at least on the multitasking iPhone, because you can listen to music in the background while doing other stuff. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Pandora works on the iPhone in much the same way it does on a PC or a Mac. You type the name of a favorite musician or song title and Pandora creates an instant personalized radio station with selections that exemplify the style you chose. Figure 17-11 shows some of the eclectic stations we created. Tapping QuickMix plays musical selections across all your stations. Tapping the New Station button, at the bottom of the screen, displays a search field. Tap that field and the iPhone keyboard appears so that you can add a new station built around an artist, a song title, or a composer. You can also select from stations Pandora has packaged together around a particular genre.

In Figure 17-12, we typed Beatles and Pandora created a Beatles station that includes performances from John, Paul, George, and Ringo, as well as tunes from other artists whose songs are similar to songs by The Beatles both collectively and individually.

And say you type in a song title, such as Have I Told You Lately. Pandora constructs a station with similar music after you tell it whether to base tunes on the Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, or other rendition.

Pandora comes out of the Music Genome Project, an organization of musicians and technologists who analyze music according to hundreds of attributes (such as melody, harmony, and vocal performances).

You can help fine-tune the music Pandora plays by tapping the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon below the album cover of the song being played, as shown in Figure 17-13.

Figure 17-13: Have we told you lately how much we like Pandora?

If you tap the triangular icon, you can bookmark the song or artist being played, e-mail to a friend the station that the song is playing on, or head to iTunes to purchase the song directly on the iPhone (if available).