ReadWriteWeb

Music recommendation service Pandora marked today what it calls perhaps its proudest milestone in 6 years since launching: 10 billion user interactions indicating approval or disapproval of a particular song. Those thumbs up or down are used to determine subsequent recommendations for a particular user's Pandora channels.

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.

European upstart music service Spotify just announced that it is putting new limits on its millions of free account holders. "[I]t's vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you," the company said in its announcement, "but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward."

CNet's Greg Sandoval reported yesterday that some new limits were coming, based on unnamed but clearly well-informed sources. Free account holders today are able to listen to up to 20 hours of music on-demand, song by song and album by album, each month. The new limits will allow 20 hours for the first 6 months of any user's new account. After 6 months, free listening will be cut down to 10 hours. That means 20 minutes on average, every day of the month, for free. That's still generous, as far as I'm concerned.

For online radio service Pandora, the car was a logical place to take their web app. At a SXSW Interactive panel on connected cars, Jessica Steel of Pandora noted that radio is already a well established experience inside a car. "50% of all radio listening happens in the car," she said, so it was "a really important strategic destination" to bring Pandora into the vehicle.

This is the fourth post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. So far we've looked at music on smartphones, news apps on the iPad and RSS Readers on smartphones. Today we go well outside the traditional PC world, where the Web has only just begun to make inroads: the car.

There is simply nothing like Twitter for being a fly on the wall. People sit at work and tweet about what they're doing. They tweet at night, they tweet in the morning and they tweet a lot on the weekends - find a vein of good tweets from a group of people you want to learn from, watch it over time and the world is your oyster.

That's my theory, anyway. One of the things I'm interested in tracking are the streaming music services. So tonight I built a Twitter list of people who work at Rdio, Pandora, Mog and Spotify. (Then I remembered Grooveshark!) Give it a click and you can follow it too. I'll show you how I made it below - and of course this process could be applied to any field.

Tweetlouder is a new service that uses your Twitter account and your music listening history to connect you with Twitter and concert updates from all your favorite musicians in just a few clicks. It's a project of concert tracking startup SonicLiving. It was first demonstrated as a proof of concept at Twitter's developer conference, Chirp.

I've been syncing my music listening history from Rdio and Spotify to Last.fm lately, so it was really easy to click click click and boom - there's the official Twitter accounts of all the bands I've been playing on those services. You can also sync with iTunes or Pandora. After I followed the bands it discovered on Twitter, I put them in a Twitter List, which I can now visit whenever I want to see some music updates. Cool. Thanks, Tweetlouder.

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.

Just the other day, I introduced my mother to music recommendation service Pandora. We'd been discussing how my grandfather used to love listening to barbershop music and she said she missed it and would love to find a way to listen. Finding the music she wanted, however, was not so easy, as we needed to find the right band or song that exemplified the music she wanted to hear - it was a journey through Google, Wikipedia, AllMusic and a number of other sites.

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.

Fans of "old media" who treasure the sensation of flipping through inky newsprint have argued against the customized curation of Internet news. As they see it, this eliminates the chance of discovering a story or topic you didn't know you were looking for. However, the Internet has been known to leverage technology in order to resolve these conflicts. Just as Pandora helps music lovers discover music according to their tastes, a new app for the iPhone - The Accidental News Explorer (ANE) - invites users to "look for something, find something else."

Free streaming music recommendation service Pandora Radio will turn 5 years old this week, and it's hard to think of very many social web technologies that have touched more peoples' lives. On August 29th, 2005, Pandora opened from private beta to the public with a feature-set much like what it has today.

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.

Some surveys come out and my first response is the people asking the questions obviously weren't talking to me or my friends. A perfect example of this is the latest survey by mobile entertainment company Myxer, which tells us that the CD still reigns supreme, the radio is the top source for music discovery and Pandora - the website designed to play music customized to your expressed taste - ranks second to last in how we find new tunes to add to our collections.

While the survey tries to tell us that things haven't changed as much as we'd like to think, we believe that the scales have tipped and the end of days are near for the old guard.