Pandora One Review

This is a review of Pandora One.

My history of streaming audio goes all the way back to discjockey.com, which was the first site to stream songs on the internet. I cannot find any evidence of this, so you have to take my word. Since then I’ve bounced around. For a while it was launchcast from Yahoo, until they made a deal with CBS to move to their platform. Yech.

Last year, we bought iPads and I started messing with Pandora. Primarily I used it for Christmas music, but since the beginning of the year I’ve been using it all the time when working. Pandora allows you to “create” your own radio stations. By rating the music they play, you can tailor a station to your tastes. My primary station is Thompson Twins with Jay Z and Guns N Roses. Yeah, go figure.

By April of this year I was using Pandora so much I hit a 40 hour a month time limit. I had no idea it existed. I googled it and found it was relatively easy to get around the limit, but why? They are providing a service I am using all the time, so why not pay. The pay option I chose was Pandora One.

Pandora One did one important thing for me, it removed the 40 hour time limit. It also gives you the following features:

• No ads. These really never bothered me, anyway.
• Higher bit rate. Yeah, I cannot tell a difference through my PC speakers.
• A desktop app. I always use the browser.
• Themes. I’ll just leave it at that.

Paying was a very simple process and it upgraded my player right away, which was an awfully nice touch.

The only thing I don’t like about Pandora One is really an issue with Pandora. If you thumbs down too many songs you can no longer skip them. Pandora isn’t to blame, it is the music industry. As a side note, I just read a great article about how tech companies should just buy the music industry and be done with it.

If you’re looking for a solid streaming of music you enjoy, you have to buy Pandora One. It’s a simple process and supports an effort we can all get behind.