Hello and welcome, to my blog.

I’ve been a user and passionate fan of Pandora for many months now, and while I enjoy the service overall like a good sports fan I find that sometimes I just need more from my music service. Pandora’s logic of music suggestion and it’s possible improvements is a whole separate article waiting to be written, but it is that and my need for a more enhanced and information rich application that drove me to design this mockup for a socially enhanced “web 2.0″ (it just feels dirty saying that now) web radio interface.

Some notes to read either before you peep the proof (or after you lazy SOB)… not in any order:

1. First off I want to say that this isn’t a redesign for Pandora, nor is it the ultimate web radio interface, it’s just simply some ideas, put into graphical form in Fireworks 8 to start a discussion and to express some creativity. Many of the features/tie-ins would never work in the “real world” but that’s what a concept is all about, now isn’t it?
2. The lyrics were grabbed from some random Google index lyrics site, so they’re probably not accurate but are there to illustrate a point; Music is much better when there’s lyrics to read and following along with the song would be a killer feature. Unfortunately, things like technology, cost and greed are the obstacles to this feature.
3. The Lyrics, Artist/Album information could all be controlled by an “internal” Wiki our the external Wikipedia.org site. The exception probably being lyrics as it isn’t covered by Wiki now (yet?).
4. The photo feed from Flickr, and the video feeds from MetaCafe are just quick example of integrating these social based media sites into the web interface. My original intention was to allow the user to change the source of the feeds, from MetaCafe to YouTube, to Revver or instead of Flickr maybe Google Image search and any of the other large photos sites with a nice search API.
5. The section I like the least out of all is the web player/station management section. I know, it’s a big portion so why don’t I like it? It’s a little too cluttered, and probably for revision 2 (if there is one) I’ll expand that section out to really isolate the 3 most important items; Song Player, Call to Action (Purchase) and Station Management.
6. The control of the interface is another section I’d enhance over time, as I found Pandora’s controls to be limiting and all too often very inaccurate. The ability to dive very deeply into your own music tastes and discover new music is key for a service like this, something I think Pandora lacks. The faded out “Add Artist” “Add Producer” links hint at these features as many times a certain album or producer may appeal to you but not the artists in particular.

Other sections/features I gave thought to were ..

1. RSS feeds from your station, or the ability to import artists specific RSS feeds from the blogosphere to add to the available artist information.

2. Calendar/Event section to help the artist promote local shows and to help fans find them when and where they are happening, which means more money in the artist’s pocket
3. I also gave thought to a section that really explores the relationship of 1 track or artists to another, again all in the name of finding new, possibly obscure music that matches your tastes. You could see a tree of related artists and navigate visually the relationship between artists, producers, song writers, etc.

4. Tags, plain and simple the ability to tag tracks, artists etc. and adding a tag cloud to the page would allow people to explore music in a new way without having to rely on Category>Sub Category etc. which all too often doesn’t define the song/genre well appropriately.

All in all this exercise was fun, and something I’ll do again, hopefully with some good feedback (*wink *wink) from the Social news crowd I can get proper inspiration for a version 2.

Much Props To:

1. FamFamFam for some free icons to play with.
2. Paul Wall for “Sittin’ Siwdewayz”
3. Pandora for sucking most of the time (which inspired me to create this mockup/article)