Remember back in the day when the general thought was that radio rocked…except for the commercials? Then along came MP3 players, and we finally had that. The only problem, of course, was being limited to the music we owned. Without radio, there’s less room for experimentation. Then along came Pandora, the streaming Internet radio service which breaks songs down into their most fundamental attributes and plays songs based on what you like. After a long wait, we finally got the BlackBerry Pandora app about three months ago. I’ve been using it constantly ever since, and it’s high time we posted a walk-through and review of the application.
Once you launch the application you’ll be asked if you’re an existing Pandora user or if you’re new to the service. If you’re new you’ll go to a quick account creation page, where you’ll enter your email, password, birth year, gender, and ZIP code. You can opt into emails, but I’d recommend unchecking that box. Once you fill in all the above information and check the box noting that you agree to the terms of use, you’re ready to get started. If you already have a Pandora, enter in your email address and password (which you might forget — I did, because the website never logs me out).
Creating a station
Once you create your account, Pandora will prompt you to name a band, song, or composer you like. This is used as the base for your station. So just think of your favorite band in the world (mine’s Led Zeppelin). After entering in the name you’ll see a screen with some options for matching artists and songs. Click the one you want and Pandora will take you to your new station. More often than not, this will kick off with a song from the band you selected.
From here you can do a number of things. First, you can rate the song up or down. If you rate it up Pandora makes a note in its database and the computer learns a bit more about your musical likes. It will attempt to play more songs with the attributes of the song you like. Second, you can find out why Pandora picked the song for you. For instance, when Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix came up, Pandora explained:
