music-aholics UNITE!

okay, i’ll admit it. i’m a music-aholic. i’m a huge band geek and love to make music as well as listen to it. i won’t drive or ride in the car without a CD in or the radio on. i have multiple CDs of the most random types of music you could imagine. my mp3 player is full and i can’t bear to delete any of my songs to add more. i constantly force my friends to make me new CDs. whether it’s techno, rap, pop, rock, classics, or my personal favorite, 80s music, i always want to listen to it. i can’t get enough of my music.

i’ve found a place for my fellow music-aholics. it’s called pandora.com. if you live under a rock (or without the internet), i’ll fill you in. you go to the website and make an account with just your email (don’t you hate when websites have you fill in every detail of your life to make an account through them). then you’re ready for the fun part. you have the ability to make a different station for all of your favorite types of music. you simply type in an artist or song and the website uses amazing technology to create your own personalized radio station with (gasp) no commercials! and that’s only the beginning of the pluses. if you make a station based off of a song it won’t play the song right away, instead playing similar ones, usually by the same artist. if they play a song you don’t like then just click the “thumbs down” button and they will never play it again. if you like it, click the “thumbs up” button and it will play it the next time you log in. you can even add songs from one station to another.

i have found very few disadvantages to pandora so far. one negative is that their music licenses make them limit the number of songs that you can skip each hour. of course if you really feel the need to hear a different song, then you can just create another station based on another song. another bad thing would be that you can’t choose the order that the songs play in. of course this is coming from the girl who will listen to a song on repeat for an hour, so maybe the forced changing of songs is a good thing.

this has expanded my favorite song list in crazy ways. i find myself clicking the “thumbs up” button a whole lot more than the “thumbs down” button since the technology pretty much insures that you will be hearing songs like the one that the station is created for. it’s so much better than the normal radio since you can pause, delete, and skip the songs that you are listening to. pandora really has satisfied my craving for more new music.

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