For all you busy travelers who can’t tune into the radio to find new music or may have forgotten to load your favorite CD onto your MP3 player, Pandora can solve your problems.  Pandora came from the Musical Genome Project.  This volunteer project was to break down all songs in the world into a basic description of its musical properties.  It essentially was trying to define the musical DNA of each song in its database.

Pandora is easy to use.  Surf to the Pandora web site using your high speed Internet connection and tell Pandora what are your favorite artists and/or songs.  It will take your starting list of favorites and match it with other songs by other artists that have similar DNA. All of the songs, the ones you know and the ones you are just discovering, are served directly to you over your personal Pandora “station.”  You can mix the song styles to create your own personal Internet “radio” stations. 

The best part for travelers is that your music is always on the Internet for you.  The only down side is that you are going to need a high speed connection.  Pandora can also have trouble if the server that you are using is configured to prevent streaming. 

Try it out, and let me know how well it works for you.   

Technorati tags: travel, Internet, radio, music, Pandora, personalization, streaming music