I know, I know, I just posted on this awesome new music service a few days ago but they’ve added this new feature called Backstage that I think is worthy of another post.
If you use Pandora primarily to find new music you’ll like and not so much to listen to tunes 24×7 then you’ll love Backstage. Type in an artist and you’ll get a biography and a selected discography. From this page, you can create a station on your Pandora Radio, shoot an email to a friend about the artist or add the artist to your [Pandora] bookmarks for later use.
Want to go a little deeper? Click on an album. You get a great album summary and a complete track listing with samples of each song, a la iTunes or Amazon. And finally, the magic part – a listing of similar albums by other artists determined by the “genome” of the music. Check out my first post for more info on this.
Now here’s where this service gets really handy. You can click on each individual song and get similar music recommendations – all this based on the genome of that particular song. Different songs on the same album will yield different recommendations because each song is different in many specific ways, even on the same album by the same artist. This is great if you like one or two songs on an album and would like to find similar songs by other artists. From here you can also create a station on your Pandora Radio based on this particular song.
Pandora is so much more than a great new way to listen to music – I think it’s a yet-to-be-fully-realized tool that will revolutionize the music discovery process. I’ve added literally dozens of artists to my to-buy list which, honestly, has been empty for quite some time.
If you haven’t tried Pandora out yet I highly recommend it. Build yourself a station or two, listen to some great new tunes, and then head backstage. I haven’t had this much fun listening to music since I got my personal cassette player for Christmas when I was 10.
Oh yea – consider this an official warning – you will get lost in the Pandora database. I once had to hit my back button no less than 10 times to find out how I got myself to Oingo Boingo.