The Perfect Music Radio Station

The evolutionary transformation of the media industry by the Internet is perfectly exemplified by Pandora.  To understand Pandora's attraction, one must be reminded of what makes traditional music radio so compelling.  Like traditional television, traditional radio is a sit-back experience.  We tune to our favorite station and forget about it.  The music just plays in the background with each new title a complete surprise.

This is the exact opposite of downloading music from iTunes.  With iTunes, we first need to know what to download, then we need to download it, and then we need to decide what to actually play.  Sure, we can randomize and auto-play but how big is our library going to be if we need to pay $0.99 for each downloaded song?

Pandora gives us the best of both worlds and more.  We get to define a radio station that includes a seemingly infinite collection of music that we like.  We then get to train the radio station to be even more tailored to our taste. We can skip a song we don't like or we can tell Pandora to give us more songs like the current song.  After a while Pandora realy gets to know us so it occasionally gambles on playing an out-of-the-box song that it thinks we will like -- helping us discover beautiful music that we did not even know existed.

All this works very well on the computer and on mobile apps.  But, what if we want to listen to Pandora on our home audio system?  Here again, the two-screen users interface makes Pandora even better!

Selecting a TV screen on the Pandora app plays music through the home's AV system.

You simply start the Pandora app.  Select a TV by using the Screen Select button on the touchscreen.  Select the radio station and your favorite music will play through your TV speakers or through your surround-sound home stereo system (if your TV is connected to an AV amplifier).