14 DAY TRIAL // Pandora Media, formerly known as Savage Music Technologies, launched this week the service based on the Music Genome Project, the company's six year study of the 300,000 songs of more than 10,000 artists undertaken by 30 musician analysts.
The analysts rate each song across 400 musical traits, including melody, rhythm, orchestration and lyrics. That allows users to easily discover artists and songs they weren't familiar with.
The first 10 hours of Pandora are free, as a trial period, buy after that subscriptions cost $3 a month or $36 per year. For this money, subscribers gain access to up to a 100 online radio stations tuned to their preferences and also to the service itself, which is in fact a "why is this song playing" button to help you find the reasoning behind the company's team of analysts rating a particular song as similar to a user's original stated preference.
Due to music licensing restrictions, the Pandora service cannot play songs by request or offer a rewind function, but it has links to Amazon.com's Web site and Apple Computer's iTunes service, so users can buy the music they hear.
Pandora runs on Windows 2000 or Windows XP, via Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox Web browsers and also on Mac OS X 10.3, with Safari or Firefox.
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