In Greek, Pandora means ’all gifted’ and in Greek mythology it was the name of the first woman, invested with gifts and talents from all the Gods.

Pandora is also the name of a new Web based service that can be compared to your very own radio station or a personal DJ. All you do is tell it what kind of music you like and it lets you discover more music like it.

Your own radio station

When you go to the Pandora website, the mail item on the front page is a music player. All you have to do to try it out is to enter the name of a song or an artist. Pandora then starts playing songs you might like based on this information.

The music player has a button called ‘Guide us’. When you click it you can approve or reject the song currently playing. If you don’t like a song that Pandora has chosen for you she will apologize and promise to never play it again.

You also have the option of adding more kinds of music to your station. This is done as easily as you started out using Pandora – you just add the name of a song or an artist.

The playlist that drives your station is changed at once to take into account the new information. The songs that play from that point on will change to reflect what you’ve told us about your musical tastes.

Adding a song to a station will expand the range of music played on that station. How much it expands depends on how different the song you just added is from the rest of the songs and artists that define that station.

Adding an artist name to a station will expand the music range much more than adding a song. Pandora will try to cover the entire range of music of the chosen artist.

To keep your radio station you need to register. This will also let you make as many as 100 stations and to share your station with your friends.

The Music Genome Project

Pandora makes her decisions based on information from the Music Genome Project. This is a comprehensive analysis of music. A team of thirty musician-analysts has been listening to music, one song at a time.

They have studied and collected hundreds of musical details on every song. This process takes 20 to 30 minutes per song and it capture the details that give each tune its special character - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics …

And it is not just mainstream music that Pandora is familiar with. She knows strange tunes like ‘Start Wearing Purple’ with the New York Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello or ’Summer’ by the Norwegian indie chamber-rock trio Bel Canto.

What’s in a name

If you remember the ancient Greek story about Pandora, you know that it was not an entirely happy one. Along with all the gifts and talents she received from the Gods there was a box, and she was told not to open it. When she decided to open it anyway, she unleashed a lot of misfortunes on the world.

The myth of Pandora’s box has been used to shame the curious explorers among us to keep them within the boundaries of a safe though boring society. The good people from the Music Genome Project have a different take on this:

In ancient Greek mythology, Pandora received many gifts from the Gods, including the gift of music, from Apollo. She was also, as we all know, very curious. Unlike those Gods of old, however, we celebrate that virtue and have made it our mission to reward the musically curious among us with a never-ending experience of music discovery.

So go ahead and satisfy your musical curiosity with the help of Pandora. If you are curious about Pandora myth, you can read more about her in this Wikipedia article.