caught in the crowd

I listen to a lot of music when I am at work. In the past I was at the liberty of the iTunes libraries on my newsroom’s computers. This usually left me bored, depressed and tuneless because those libraries contained music I did not like.

My boyfriend sent me a link for pandora.com and I was instantly intrigued. I could create my own Internet radio stations with my favorite bands! It was a joyous event.

So I started with my favorite band, which—laugh if you want—is No Doubt. I eventually added bands from Coheed and Cambria to Ben Folds to Muse … And the list keeps expanding. Basically, if I like a band, I add them to my station.

This resulted in sheer pandemonium at first, but after some fine tweaking and selective song deletion I made it work. In fact, my boyfriend, who has musical tastes similar to my own, decided he liked my station better and uses it instead of his own.

Thats the beauty of Pandora. I can select my favorite bands, favorite songs and share my station with whomever I want. And as a plus, Pandora selects bands to play on my stations that are similar to the bands I like. To spice things up, every now and then the station will throw in a random song that does not coincide with my favorites. Sometimes I like the song, sometimes I don’t.

If I like the song and want to hear it again I can give it a ‘thumbs up.’ If I hate it, I can either skip it, which prevents the song from playing awhile, or I can give it a ‘thumbs down,’ and it will never play again.

In my next posts, I will brag about the bands I have discovered through Pandora. I have widened my musical knowledge in the past 4 months. Its been amazing.

Lates.