Patrick Says

So I’ve been comparing services for free music. I’ve found two that are very similar, Pandora and Finetune. Both offer random ‘radio station’ type usability, but with differences.

Pandora offers you the opportunity to create stations around the styling of one or many artists or songs. Pandora then allows you to thumb up or thumb down each song that plays. This is really the big selling point as Pandora ‘learns’ what you like and don’t like and begins adjusting song selection accordingly. After a week of using Pandora, I had a pretty kick-ass station.

Finetune is very similar to Pandora with some notable exceptions. As far as I can tell, you can’t thumb any songs up or down on Finetune. But you can create custom playlists. With a minimum of 45 tracks and no control over the order, Finetune lets you build a station with defined tracks. You can also create random stations based on a single artist.

So, that’s a little about each service. I suggest you give them both a try and see if they meet your needs. Many months later after first discovering these services, I find I like Pandora much better. The rating system is a snap to configure and it constantly learns. My station now is near perfect and plays a lot of new music I end up enjoying. But they’re both free, so check both. Really.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.