Pandora: not the planet from Avatar ...

Pandora internet radio is a streaming music app that allows you to setup "stations" by  artist or song ... for example ... I like Wolfmother, so I typed in Wolfmother to add in a new station and lo-and-behold!  ... Pandora started playing Wolfmother ...  below the song currently being played are a couple of buttons ... skip / thumbs up / thumbs down.  When the song was over, the app started playing Led Zeppelin ... why? Because the Pandora has decided that Led Zep is pretty similar to Wolfmother so if you like Wolfmother ... you MUST like Led Zeppelin ... which you can either skip/like/dislike depending on if Pandora got that particular assumption correct.

And THAT'S the magic of Pandora. It has created,  for all of its songs, a musical genetic database that combines what it already knows about music (via how others rated the songs) with your personal taste (how YOU rated the songs) to bring you music that you should (hopefully) like.  It's a lot like how Netflix "suggested movies" work.

The app allows you to store as many "stations" as you like, and it is free as long as you can live with an advert now and then and 6 skips per hour limit.  If you subscribe to Pandora, they remove the ads and allow unlimited skipping. By the way, changing channels is not considered skipping and neither is thumbs-downing.  Just be careful,  thumbs-downing a song will remove that song from your channel forever (you can login to the pandora website and undo this though)

When the Pandora app is running it will have a Notification Bar icon that allows you to quickly access the app when you are doing something else. Also, you can pin a Pandora widget to one of your home screens if you want.

Get Pandora now from the android market »

Note: Pandora does have a browser version that allows you to access your channels from anywhere: www.pandora.com