The 10 billionth thumb was pointed up and was for the song "Ridin' Solo" by Jason DeRulo, an autotuned song I personally consider annoying and repetitive. That's the beauty of Pandora: I don't have to listen to anything like that song if I don't want to.

None the less, the company and its capacity to turn user feedback into more intelligent recommendations have become a metaphor for many people. A Google search for the phrase "like Pandora for" returns almost 50,000 results, including links to things like a "Pandora for movies" (Jinni), a "Pandora for books" (many different sites) and "Pandora for bros" (fratmusic.com).

Above: A photo of Pandora's community manager Aaron Morgan, from Twitter.

This is just one of many mashups built using the Bit.ly Application Programming Interface, which recently saw a substantial upgrade.

Today, Pandora will make this type of musical browsing easier with the addition of station-creation based on musical genres, instead of just bands or songs. Update: Pandora says it announced a day early and that genre stations will actually be live on Wednesday.

The channels will still allow for personalization with the familiar "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons letting users shape the type of music they want to hear.

Michael Zapruder, a "senior music curator" with Pandora, says the feature has been the subject of many requests.

"Our listeners have been telling us for a while that they'd like an easy way to start a station from popular genres with the option to personalize the station from there," Zapruder says in the release. "We wanted to find a uniquely Pandora way to address this consumer need so we created a number of genre stations that are carefully seeded with relevant songs and constantly refreshed with new releases."

A full list of channels will be available today on the Pandora website.

As the New York Times reports, John Simson, the executive director of SoundExchange, still argues that the original rates would have been "appropriate and fair," but he admits that these new rates will give "webcasters the opportunity to flesh out various business models and the creators of music the opportunity to share in the success their recordings generate."

Tim Westgren, Pandora's founder, points out that this is not an ideal solution, but that this deal "still represents a thoughtful and reasoned outcome under the circumstances."

Some Changes for Pandora

At least for Pandora, however, this will also mean that a small number of users who stream more than 40 hours of music per month will have to pay 0.99$ if they want to hear more music on Pandora during that month. Pandora says this will only affect about 10% of its user base and those users, of course, could also upgrade to Pandora's desktop player, Pandora One.

YouTube was just six months old at the time, Facebook was just opening up to high school students and Twitter didn't launch for almost another year. With 48 million users today, Pandora is smaller than all of those services - but if you're among those people, you probably feel a strong bond with the company that's brought you hours of free and new music. You may have moved on to other music services, but I'll bet you've got some happy memories associated with Pandora. I know I do.

Things have changed in recent years, and a service that chooses songs to play for you isn't what everyone is looking for. Other services that allow you to assemble your own playlist (like MOG, for example) and share them with friends (like Spotify) better fit some peoples' needs.

Pandora represented a number of technology trends that defined the era, though. It crunched data using its Music Genome Project and it offered user recommendations. It let users curate content and share their stations. (Here's mine.) And when Pandora's iPhone and Android apps launched, that made free streaming music on the go a reality. I remember being amazed when I first discovered Pandora on my iPhone. Weren't you?

The company is now nicely profitable and will presumably proceed well into the future. It will keep on rocking. Playlists and feature-sets aside, when you're looking for music to listen to and you've got a mood in mind more than a particular artist - Pandora is still a great way to be entertained still.

The Web interface for the popular music service has been totally overhauled, offering a sleeker, cleaner design with simplified controls. The top of the page contains iTunes-esque controls for playing, pausing and skipping songs, as well as voting them up or down. From the same toolbar, users can type in the name of any artist, composer or song to automatically generate a radio station based on their musical preferences.

Pandora also has new social and sharing features on the way. The service will soon be rolling out a Twitter-style feed of recent music-listening activity from friends to serve as "a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora." With this update, stations finally get their own dedicated URL, which makes it easier for users to share stations with each other.

Until today, Pandora had a 40-hour monthly listening cap in place as a way to keep artist royalty payment costs under control. That cap has been lifted, but the service still limits the number of times you can skip songs within a given station, due to licensing restrictions.

Pandora has been one of our favorite online destinations for streaming music recommendations for years now, but today, the site has gone one step further - stand up comedy.

The site, which lets you create stations according to genre or artist, has taken this same time-tested formula and applied it to the realm of stand-up comedy, bringing the likes of Rodney Dangerfield, Mitch Hedberg and George Carlin to its millions of monthly users.

With music, Pandora organizes songs and artists according to a number of different characteristics, as defined in the Music Genome Project. The company says it has taken a similar approach with comedy:

[...]so we've taken the same approach to comedy as we have to music: carefully and deliberately analyzing comedic "bits" across a very large number of attributes to capture the style, delivery and content of each performance. It's been a very fun experience, taking what we've learned in music and applying it to a whole new category. Now, instead of talking about "minor keys," "falsetto," and "extensive vamping," our comedy-analysts capture "odd juxtaposition" (A horse walks into a bar...), "misdirection" and "spoonerisms" (a well-boiled icicle, instead of a well-oiled bicycle)...

They say they've worked with a team of comedians, classifying more than 10,000 sketches from more than 700 different comics into a variety of genres. And if you're wondering, a warning plays when the station begins saying that it contains "explicit and offensive material", so it sounds like Pandora isn't about to censor the acts. That's good, because who wants a PG-13 Richard Prior or George Carlin, right? And just like with the music, you can create stations based on genres, which you can see below, or by comic.

Head on over to Pandora's new comedy channel and give it a whirl.

The service now also shows display ads on its website, which, to be honest, don't seem to fit into the general design of the site and look like they were just added for the sake of it.

In the Bloomberg interview, Westergreen also acknowledged that Pandora's struggle with the music industry to negotiate royalty rates could still stop the company from becoming profitable, though Westergreen also said that he is optimistic that these negotiations will come to a positive conclusion for Pandora.

last.fm 32% (207 votes)
Pandora 30% (197 votes)
Yahoo Music 9% (61 votes)
iTunes Music Service 8% (52 votes)
Rhapsody 4% (27 votes)

Note that FineTune and Live365 were added late to the poll, but both have more votes currently than AOL, MSN and Zune. There's still time to cast your vote though, so please do so in the poll below:

Online music recommendation service Pandora has had quite the ride over the last several years. In 2006, ReadWriteWeb named it a runner-up in the yearly Best Little Company round-up and we had high hopes for the company. Four months later, we were writing about how Pandora founder Tim Westergren was appealing for help to "save Internet radio" from licensing fees. A year after that, the headline read "Pandora On the Verge of Closing Shop".

Oh, how things can change. Nowadays, Pandora is everywhere, from computers to mobile phones to integrated car stereo systems. Today, the company has taken it one step further and filed for a $100 million IPO.

Pandora explained in the document that its service today is primarily a personalized radio station streamed over the Web and mobile phones, but in the future it has aspirations to do much more.

It wants to improve the service, develop new advertising products, build out its ad sales force, expand distribution to other consumer electronics and automobiles, and expand internationally. It also wants to add other types of content beyond music, such as radio formats, like talk radio or sports.

With the ubiquitous nature of Pandora these days, it's easy to forget how close to the brink the company once came. It wasn't until late 2009 - more than two years after we wrote about its near death experience - that it finally reached a deal with music labels.

Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson went through today's following and came up with a bunch of interesting stats that show off the company's recent successes. Here is an excerpt:

• Revenue for the 9 months ended October 31, 2010 was $90.12 million. That's an increase over 30.1 million over the same months in 2009.

• Net income in the first 9 months of 2010 was...a loss of $328,000. Pandora lost $18 million during the same months in 2009.

• Pandora has more than 80 million users in the US.

• During the first nine months of 2010, Pandora ad revenue reached $78 million. That's up from $29 million during the same period in 2009. That's huge growth.

• Subscription revenue was $12.3 million during the first 9 months of 2010. It was $4 million during the first 9 months of 2009. That's huge growth.

Says Pandora CTO Tom Conrad, "Pandora still runs on your iPhone and controls access to the service, but all control and display elements [will be] shifted to the dash. This allows you to tune into your stations, play songs, give thumbs up/down, as well as get information (including album art) about the currently playing song, all with your iPhone safely tucked away in the glove compartment."

While the $1200 dollar price tag for the connection device is high, the fact that the service is free will theoretically save consumers from paying monthly radio subscription fees.

As well, if Pioneer manages to partner with other music providers like Microsoft with Zune Marketplace, Spotify or MOG, then web subscriptions will simply be cross-platform music accounts. While Paid Content suggests that we're looking at the end for satellite radio companies like Sirius XM, we think the greater effect of web-enabled cars might be the end of professionally curated music. Does web music spell death for disc jockeys? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Michael Ruiz