Pandora Review

Pandora app logo

I started using the Pandora app for Android last month and I just love how great it is.

Pandora basically allows you to create radio stations based on a specific artist, genre or composer. The website states you can make 100 custom stations. Pandora further customizes these stations with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down voting method.

If you click thumbs up Pandora will know you want to hear that song again and will remember it. On the other-hand if you click thumbs down Pandora will never play that song again and go onto another song depending if you have track skips left for that hour. If you have already used all your skips Pandora will warn you that, “Unfortunately our music licenses force us to limit the number of tracks you may skip each hour. If you want to hear something else, try creating another station starting with a different artist or track.”

As of today, I have 9 custom radio stations on Pandora. 3 of them are based on artists and the rest are all specific genres. My stations are Foster the People Radio, Today’s Alternative Radio, 2000s Pop Radio, 90s Pop Radio, Eminem Radio, Billy Joel Radio. Today’s Hits Radio, 90s Country Radio and 80s Pop Radio. This gives me a varied amount of music to listen to and has led to me discovering new songs to buy.

Another feature available on Pandora that I don’t use too much is the Music Feed which allows you to follow your friends who also use Pandora. The Music Feed will then show you what they have been listening to. On your own profile you can also connect Pandora to your Facebook and Twitter accounts and show your friends on Facebook and your followers on Twitter songs you’ve liked, songs you’ve listened to and people who have followed your Pandora Music Feed.

The only downside to Pandora is that after so many songs, I’m not sure how many, Pandora plays one commercial. To me though it’s not to intrusive and is much better than traditional FM radio, commercial-wise that is. Pandora does offer a way around this with the ability to upgrade to Pandora One. Pandora One costs $3.99 a month and lets you listen to Pandora commercial free. While commercial free is the biggest benefit of Pandora One it also gives you higher quality audio, a desktop application, custom skins for the website background and fewer interruptions (Pandora will stop playing music after a period of inactivity while Pandora One allows longer listening time without interacting with the product).

Basically though Pandora does what it was created for, listening to music, very well. Allowing the listener to be able to decide what a station plays is what makes it better to use than SiriusXM satellite radio and traditional FM radio. Try it out and I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Availability: Pandora.com on the computer and as an app in the App Store and the Google Play store.