Now, I admit to not being a fan of Pandora in the beginning. The idea of a computer showing me music just sounded out of touch. I prefer podcasts where a human, who has similar tastes as mine, picked some songs that they wanted to show me. I can then, literally, thank them, and give some feedback.
I like to research the artists and learn more about them and so on. With podcasts, I would read the show notes and see if there was something I could use to look up more information. This was most often not a link, so I would have to Google whatever information was provided. I also love SomaFM (which I play via iTunes), where I’d have to open my browser and go to SomaFM.com, click the station I’m listening to, click the artist or album buy option, get redirected to Amazon search results, which often turned up nothing. So money was ready to be spent, but I moved on after too much time had just been wasted.
Then a friend told me about the commercial free desktop app called Pandora One. For $36/yr with 192kbps streams, this sounded great. So I tried the 24hr demo and later purchased the one year subscription. Pandora One is not only a discovery tool, it works very well at leading you immediately to further information on the artists and options to buy merchandise.