Pandora, which plays streaming music for free via a flash player on its site, is one of the first companies we profiled on TechCrunch, back in August 2005 during the original Bar Camp meetup. I still listen to it most of the time I’m writing blog entries.
Pandora continues to rack up new users (the current count is 4.5 million regular users, up from 1.8 million in May) and Pandora is now powering MSN radio through a deal signed last month.
Tonight Pandora is releasing a additional features aimed at increasing interaction among members. These social features include listener profiles with musical preferences, bio information, etc. (previously listeners had only a list of bookmarked songs), as well as listener search and lists of users who are fans of particular bands.
Download Pandora Songs
By the way, if you are really into Pandora, you can set up an application called Pandora’s Jar (see LifeHacker’s review here). Pandora’s Jar will save the current track playing in Pandora, and will optionally download bios, track stats, album art, and other info from last.fm as well.
Our previous coverage of Pandora is here.
