A Quick Peek at Pandora

I had a blast during my stay in the states, visiting various places and seeing sights that are hardly available in Toronto. Plus, the Winter was much milder, making the trip that much better. Unfortunately, that meant having hardly anytime to use all those services that piqued my Canadian interests! Luckily, this evening I had a chance to take a quick look at Pandora – which I must admit, is very similar to Last.fm. Thank goodness that’s still available to us.

Pandora loads very quickly, and it guides you through the whole experience very closely. The only difference between Pandora and Last.fm so far as I can see is that Last.fm needs to be downloaded onto the computer to enjoy the total experience, whereas Pandora is fine just on the internet. Basically, all you need to do is input a beloved artist and out comes the results – some new music to explore, as well as probably some of your old favourites.

Pandora’s GUI is great! It’s very user-friendly and it’s a lot more flexible than Last.fm – no need to register, no need to download the client. I’m sure that if I registered, a lot more features would have been available to me; sadly, I don’t think it’d be very realistic to sign up for a service I’m going to lose access to by tomorrow.

Being the picky listener I am, I already found one thing to whine about – the skipping limit! It was a real pain in the behind to know that I wan’t allowed to skip as many songs as I wanted to, due to some “restrictions”. Last.fm actually didn’t have this problem last time I checked. I realized I had used my quota and I gave up Pandora that instant. Might’ve been a hasty decision, but I didn’t have much of a choice anyway – I’m leaving for Canada tomorrow.

It’s probably a bit overrated by Canadians, as Pandora isn’t really that much better to use than Last.fm – in fact, they’re arguably at around the same calibur I daresay. However, I must also emphasize that I haven’t used Pandora to it’s potential yet and this is just a very quick judgment – I can be proven wrong, but it’s just a bummer to realize how restricted it is to an unregistered user. I’m still glad I had this eye-opening experience though – looks like we still can survive without Pandora. And we might have to for a while, because the RIAA hasn’t invaded Canada yet.