Pandora's brilliance lies in its basic premise: You don't know what you want to listen to until you hear it. So instead of cycling through the same old, familiar playlists on your mobile device, let Pandora turn your favorite tracks into jumping-off points for musical discovery.
Pick a song, any song. Pandora's trained musicologists classify the service's 800,000-plus tunes on up to 400 attributes, essentially assigning each one its own "DNA profile." Using this taxonomic trove of aural knowledge, called the Music Genome Project, Pandora creates smart radio stations that match your tastes, based on the song or artist you start with.
And the service only gets smarter the more you listen. If you aren't digging a song suggestion, give it a thumbs-down. That lets Pandora's algorithm know to stay away from similar music on that station in the future.
New competitors have burst onto the scene, and Pandora is beginning to look its age. It has neither the offline syncing capability of Spotify or Rdio's playlist-sharing chops. But the service still boasts the best music-discovery engine out there. Trained human ears do all the audio classification, while a computer-guided algorithm takes that info into account to quickly match songs to your tastes. It's the best of both worlds.
Using Pandora means you'll never have to touch that dial again. Every station rocks.
