After all, it’s been around since 2005 it has more than 70 million active users every month we’ve written about it many times in The Washington Post dozens of my friends use it. But I’m not sure I need to explain Pandora. You type in a song or work that you like, and Pandora offers you a range of other pieces that are supposed to be like that one you can signal whether or not you like a given piece by clicking a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon. And it wouldn’t let me.Īt this juncture in the article, I would usually explain what Pandora is: a service that lets you create custom radio stations to listen to online. The problem I was having was with the service itself. The stations, which went live last week, include a “Classical for Work” station featuring shorter excerpts and isolated movements of works (a rousing account of Copland’s “El Salon Mexico,” the second movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto) a “Classical for the Soul” channel that purports to go “a little deeper” and is, perhaps, weighted more heavily on the early-music side (the potpourri I’ve gotten so far has included a Corelli concerto, a Glinka “Capriccio Brillante” for four-hand piano, piano transcriptions of Gershwin songs, and a complete performance of the third Brahms piano quartet) and, finally and most significantly for classical fans for whom classical easy-listening formats are anathema, a “Classical Complete Performances” channel that plays symphonies, sonatas, chamber works and other pieces in full. Pandora’s creators recently went to considerable trouble to add three classical music channels to their offerings. Not that there’s any bad blood between me and the administrators of the streaming music site – far from it.