I love Pandora.  A friend of mine heard about it in 2004 while on a flight and called me on Skype because he “was certain this new Pandora-music-thing had my name written all over it.”  I’ve always been a sucker for discovering new music and the concept sounded too good to be true.

Mind you, this was back in the day when Skype was new (online users often in triple digits) and Pandora would play about 5 songs on your newly created station before running out of compatible songs.  “Searching…having difficulty…you might want to try another station…”  Ah, the good old days.  But, I stuck it out, and look what we’ve got, no, what we’ve been given, now?  Pandora has always been available for free to anyone with an Internet connection.

Pandora has offered subscriptions, which removed the ads.  Pandora One removes the ads for your $36-a-year AND you get 192kbps streaming, a few cool skins for the web-based player, longer uninterrupted play time if inactive (5 hours) and a desktop app option.

As you can imagine, I’m on the computer and Internet all day:  readers, feeders, e-mail, adding content to websites, writing blogs, editing, Twitter, Facebook, Google docs, hosted CRM and project management tools…and that's all before my second cup of coffee.

The desktop app was my first target.  I have accidentally exited Pandora too many times to count when I close my browser, even when I’ve had the mini-player open I mistake it for yet another open browser and just click it off.  I may be tech-savvy but that doesn't make me occasionally absentminded.

I love it!  It’s Adobe Air so it looks cool (below—I've got a black desktop; the app is translucent).  No alternate skins available that I see, but surely those will come.  The best part: I’ve not closed it once on accident today!

Being the true Pandora user (I’m all thumbs) I can’t leave the damn thing alone for 5 hours to test the interruption time, but, it’s been streaming on high quality since I purchased the subscription at about 10am with no downtime. No computer freakisms. All equals one very happy gal!

With the RIAA issues and Pandora sticking it out with no income for nearly 10 years, I’m more than happy to toss in my $36 a year (that’s $3 a month!) to hear my personally tailored music genome all day. 

I’d also like to thank Pandora for hanging in there.  I hope it was worth it; this listener thinks so!

<cheers>

Rock on, Bozos! ~ Donna