Yeah, I know my post title sounds dirty. Get over it. Anyways, I'm actually talking about Pandora, the music discovery engine. If you haven't heard of it, Pandora is an awesome way to listen to the music you love and discover new music that you might like. Here's how it works. Visit the site and click "create an account". Pandora will ask you to create a station by entering the name of an artist that you like. It'll play a song by that artist, and then it will start playing songs similar to that style. You can vote on whether you like a song or not, click to buy the song from iTunes, buy the album from Amazon, even ask Pandora why it played the song. Pretty cool.
Oh and don't worry about missing anything with the free version of Pandora. It has the same exact features as the paid version, but the free version sports an unobtrusive ad on the page.

Now that you've got the hang of using Pandora, try a couple of hacks to enhance it. First, there's PandoraFM, which is a cool mashup of Pandora and Last.fm. If you use Last.fm, then you know that normally any music you listen to on your computer gets listed on your Last.fm profile. But this doesn't work with listening to Pandora. Enter PandoraFM. PandoraFM lets you listen to Pandora and get the songs you hear entered into your Last.fm profile. All you have to do is enter your account info for both Pandora and Last.fm and PandoraFM works its magic.

Here's another cool Pandora hack for Winamp users. You can listen to Pandora in Winamp! Just follow the easy directions on this guy's blog for it to work.

Happy listening!

Categories: Music, Links