Jango: The next Pandora

Mike November 6th, 2007 Music

Some of us don’t have fancy iPods or other MP3 players like others do. There are just those kinds of people out there who always have to have the latest stuff, the latest cool toys or gadgets. It gets annoying, right?

Okay, so I’m one of those and I own an iPod. I’d have an iPhone too more than likely if I could use it with Verizon without major hacking.

So, to get off that tangent…some people don’t have MP3 players and some people may want to find new music but don’t necessarily have the time to sit on the laptop and search through iTunes for music. The problem with your iPod is that you only get to listen to what’s on it. It doesn’t go out and discover new music for you.

Enter Jango.

If you’ve read my blog in the past 3-4 months, you might remember I talked briefly about Pandora, which was an internet radio station in a way. You can setup radio stations based off of bands and music you like, and it’s built-in algorithms discover other music you might like.

Well, that’s still a great site, but Jango has combined what Pandora does with Social Networking. It’s like Pandora + Facebook/MySpace in a way.

You create an account, set up a station and your profile. Once you have your music going, it will show you other people with the same tastes as you, who might like the same band or the same genre of tunes. You can view their profiles and even listen to their stations.

Like what someone has? You can add it to your own favorites and anytime you want, you can pull up their station and listen.

The greatest thing about Pandora and Jango in my opinion is the ability to discover new music.

When you first create a station, you usually pick a band. Once you do, it will offer suggestions for other bands that are in the same genre or have the same sound as your choice. You can then add them to the station.

But let’s say you just choose one band. Of course I picked Snow Patrol, because I love them more than any band out there and wanted to see what happened. So the station starts playing a song from Snow Patrol and offers you a way to rate it, which helps it learn whether or not to play it again, or how much to play it.

Along the way though, it starts playing different bands that sound like your first choice. For Snow Patrol, it played Coldplay, The Killers, etc. This is the greatest tool to me. You can tell it how wide a range to go for finding other bands too, so you can really discover some obscure stuff. When you hear a new song, you can then rate that as well.

It basically builds a custom radio station set with songs you like and in the style you like. I even tried a Christian band (Third Day) and it brought up like 12 other recommended bands, from Switchfoot and Skillet, to Jars of Clay and Barlow Girl. So it covers a wide area.

The other amazing thing is that while it plays your music, you can leave your profile or station and browse their entire social network and the music NEVER STOPS. It acts like you’ve stayed on the same page. So you can explore their site, read profiles and friends’ stuff and never stop listening to tunes.

Hopefully they’ll create a popup version of the station though, so you can really just play your station and then browse somewhere else, but it’s still awesome how it follows you through their site.

Here is the benefit for those that read this long blog and want to try it out. It’s in Beta right now, which means you have to wait a few days or longer to get accepted to create an account.

But I have three invites that will get you in the backdoor and also a link to Mashable’s secret backdoor way to register.

My invites (once someone signs up with one, it wont work anymore):

Invite 1
Invite 2
Invite 3

Mashable’s backdoor

I hope you try it out and let me know what you think! Find me on there somehow and add me as a friend!

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