Let Pandora.com Help You Discover New Music That You'll Love

Type in the name of an artist or song, and Pandora will play songs it think you'll like. It's choices are based on the data gathered for the Music Genome Project, a six-year effort that is the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken.

Each time you typer in a new artist or song, you save it as a station. You can also share your stations with your friends. Pandora even tells you why it chose a particular song to play for you. And it has options to help you buy any of the songs you like from iTunes, or buy the whole album from Amazon.com. And with each song, you can tell Pandora whether you like it or not, so it can learn to make better choices for you.

It's all browser-based, so there's nothing to download. And of course, it's free (ad supported), although there are also paid options that get rid of the ads.

It's a bit like Yahoo! Music, which let you build your own customized station by rating songs, but while I liked the Yahoo! service, I eventually gave up on it -- it only worked in IE, and they ended up limiting the free service so much it wasn't worth bothering with.

Not only is it cool to find new music that I like, but it's fun to play around with it too, just to see what songs it'll play.