Pandora no doubt is a fantastic application, absolutely groundbreaking when it initially hit the scene. When I purchased an Android phone, it was one of the first apps I installed. That said, I like many guitarists have some fairly eclectic tastes and I've found that for less popular artists on the fringes of several different genres Pandora's library is actually pretty slim. Having the same songs play over and over gets old especially if one's goal is to discover new music. As such, I began spelunking the depths of Google Play, and found a Pandora alternative worthy of consideration...Raditaz.

In many ways, Raditaz feels like Pandora 2.0...

Raditaz offers a 14 million song library (versus Pandora's ~900,000 song library) with a "music brain powered by The Echo Nest". What's the Echo Nest? It's a music intelligence platform similar to Pandora's Music Genome Project used to provide analysis and categorize songs into customized stations. The biggest difference is Pandora's Music Genome Project is the result of human analysis of 450 musical attributes per song while The Echo Nest's musical analysis is automated including both musical attributes as well as a song/artists web presence on blogs, forums, reviews etc. Raditaz limits skipping to six per channel per hour while Pandora's 6 limit skip is across all channels though Pandora also offers an upgrade to a paid subscription eliminating ads and skip restrictions. Both services offer web based and smart phone experiences, though this review focuses purely on Android based usage.

In many ways, Raditaz feels like Pandora 2.0, a user inputs an artist or a song and Raditaz will build a custom station. Songs can be praised/panned which allow stations to become more finely tuned to user preferences. Though that's where the similarities end. Unlike Pandora, Raditaz allows users to further refine stations by inputting multiple artists/songs as well as dual sliders controlling artist and song popularity/familiarity. 

Trial A: U2

U2 was input into both Pandora and Raditaz with no rating of tracks and no skipping allowed. I listed to each service for around an hour. Raditaz started off bizarrely matching U2 tracks with Aerosmith tracks. While I like Aerosmith, not exactly a band I'd group stylistically with U2. Fortunately, that only lasted for the first four songs after which U2 dominated the play list with a nice mix covering their multi-decade career. Raditaz did include a few interesting seemingly location based choices though, fellow Irish rockers The Undertones and The Pogues. Pandora matched the amount of U2 songs Raditaz played also with nice mix of old and new. That said, Pandora's playlist was slightly more listenable to the average U2 fan than Raditaz including familiar artists such as Coldplay, The Cure, and The Verve. Have to give Pandora the win here. While I appreciate and understand Raditaz's song list choices, I just feel Pandora was more listenable.

Trial B: King's X

King's X is one of my favorite bands and as they are a group largely under the radar, I thought they'd be an excellent candidate to test. Conditions of the test were the same as Trial A but the listening session extended to about an hour and a half. Raditaz's song selection was nearly 50% King's X music vs Pandora closer to 20%. For some reason, Pandora categorized King's X as a grunge band playing an equal amount of Alice in Chains as King's X additionally sprinkling in a Soundgarden and Pearl Jam song. Raditaz had a more heavy metal take focusing on music extremely similar to King's X which most fans would be familiar with such as Galactic Cowboys (a band very similar stylistically who have toured with and collaborated together several times) and solo material from King's X guitarist Ty Tabor. Both included a guitar instrumental tune and the Living Colour song Cult of Personality. Raditaz did include one odd pick, a Spanish language power ballad. As a King's X fan, I have to give Raditaz the win as it just seemed to zero in on the fanbase niche better. That said, Pandora again included far more familiar songs for the less ardent King's X fan.

Trial C: Zero 7

Zero 7 is a British electronica band which often blurs the lines between acid jazz, Pink Floyd style British psychedelia, and down-tempo lounge. I must admit to not being quite as familiar with this genre as some others, and ironically discovered this band through a Pandora station built around John Scofield's song Jungle Fiction. Raditaz did a excellent job of picking similar artists such as Yonderboi and Sneaker Pimps. Pandora also performed very well with a playlist including artists such as Thievery Corporation and Sinewave. Both services included a tracks by Air and Morcheeba. Like trial B, Raditaz played more songs by the target artist. Another noticeable difference was the number of ads Pandora served up. Not sure if they had a brief bug, but an ad was served about every third song (a much higher rate than I typically experience using Pandora) while I never heard a single ad in all three tests on Raditaz. I'd have to give the slight edge to Raditaz again.

Overall performance between both services was a toss up. I did have a couple issues when exiting Raditaz where the app just didn't want to go away seemingly restarting itself after exit which will hopefully be solved in a future update. That said, I've had Pandora get stuck buffering a track on quite a few occasions as well. Given Raditaz's excellent performance against Pandora without using its advanced features and extremely limited advertising at the time of this writing, I'm making the switch.  Not entirely sure how Raditaz will financially sustain itself long term, surely more ads will be coming as the service builds popularity, or perhaps a fee for more advanced features. As such, get it while its hot...and free.