The ways that people listen to music these days has drastically changed. Just like everything else in the world, music has gone high tech. Pandora Radio, in a way, revolutionized the way that people listen to music these days, and other companies have followed suit with their products.Pandora is an Internet-based radio that lets you be the DJ. It is a music recommendation service that lets you enter an artist or song, and it does the rest of the work. The radio shuffles through a list of several songs that are similar to the one you entered. All you have to do is sit back and relax, and the music will continue to flow.
Pandora, an Oakland-based company, was founded in 2000 by Tim Westergren, and for the most part has spent the past 10 years struggling to stay afloat. But Pandora kept fighting, and may have found its way to get and stay atop. With the app stores on many smartphones offering a free Pandora app, investors are catching on and wanting to be part of it.
Pandora has about 48 million users that use about 11.5 hours a month, according to the New York Times. They reported that:
"Pandora's success can be credited to old-fashioned perseverance, its ability to harness intense loyalty from users and a willingness to shift directions--from business to consumer, from subscription to free, from computer to mobile--when its fortunes flagged."
There are over 700,000 songs in the Pandora database, that were all categorized by an employee that are based on 400 musical attributes. Some of the attributes include harmony, melody, rhythm, instrumentation, and vocal performance. Vocal performance alone might have up to 30 attributes alone.
One thing that is nice about Pandora is that it may open you up to new artists or songs that you might not have been otherwise exposed to through normal radio. And chances are since it is being played on a station you chose, you'll like what you hear.
In January, Pandora even announced a deal with Ford to include Pandora in its voice-activated sync system. And since the iPhone app was created, Pandora's daily sign ups have more than doubled.
Pandora had to fight and claw it's way out of the junkyard, but it will continue to revolutionize that way that music is listened to.
