Sunday, May 26, 2013

Pandora was my idea.  Sort of .  When MP3 music first came out and the internet was burgeoning, I speculated out loud that before long, buying music would be a thing of the past.  My thought was that you would pay for a subscription to a music service that was completely customizable so that you could create a playlist that would be streamed to you over the internet.  Apparently I was not the only one thinking that this was on the horizon, as the folks at Pandora created the “Music Genome Project”.  They collected and cataloged a gigantic library of music, categorizing each song and artist that would allow them to be related to other songs and artists in a similar category.  By selecting a song or artist or a combination of the two, their computer could pick music or artists in a similar genre and combine them into a customized “station” that had music you very likely would approve of.  OK….This implementation was far and away more complex and slicker than my original concept, and it was FREE.  Or nearly so.  A few years ago they began to sneak some advertisements into the free version, but the paid version is ad-free which is how I really prefer my music.  I cannot tolerate radio because I cannot tolerate commercials any more.  There must be a cosmic maximum of commercials that one can be exposed to in a lifetime before their brain explodes, and I think that between all the television we watched as kids as well as the non-stop AM radio we listened to, I am very close to that maximum.  That is why Pandora was such a blessing in my life.  Before Pandora, to avoid commercials, I would play cd’s and cassette tapes in my office for background music, and to sing along with.  To do this, someone had to be the DJ which was usually me and was way too much trouble.  When the MP3 revolution occurred, I ripped all of my CDs into MP3s and burned them onto a CD to play in the office.  I could get about 12 hours of music on a CD which was much better, but even with many MP3 CDs, variety was still a problem, and so was normalization (hearing everything at the same volume rather than one song being loud and another soft).  And then came Pandora.  For $25 a year, I could set up multiple stations, pick the one we’d like to listen to, and then leave it to their computer to make all those hard music decisions for us.  My Pandora has about 40 stations now, and sometimes unsavory stations created by ghosts….or maybe zombies….show up, but for the most part I am able to sing along with whatever station we choose.  I don’t complain about variety now, and my staff doesn’t complain, they just celebrate the days that Robert works as he is much more open-minded about what he will listen to.