Video may have killed the radio star, but Pandora brought 'em back...

So, I already knew that my favorite local(ish) radio station (DC101, if you care) had a live stream - I've listened to it before. I tried to bring it up just for this Thing, but there's apparently some glitch in the stream - matter of fact, the morning show guy mentioned something about this morning, so there was no joy there.

After reading the descriptions, I decided to open up Pandora's box - and yowza, what a treasure I found inside! I immediately set up a channel called "Bowling for Soup Radio" (my favorite band) and while Pandora didn't come up with many bands I hadn't heard of before, it did let me listen to some music that I really enjoyed. I got a kick out of the thumbs up/thumbs down feature - (I love how basic that is!), and though it took me a little while to find, I made pretty good use of the skip forward button. Apparently, I made a little bit too much use of the skip forward and thumbs down features... Pandora issued a polite pop up that said that there is a limit to the number of songs you are allowed to skip per hour! My immediate response was frustration, but Pandora also lets you know that you can just create another station that will let you skip more songs. Whew! I was a little bit more careful about skipping after that, though.

So I set up a new station, this time based on The Dropkick Murphys song, "I'm Shipping Up to Boston" - Pandora wasn't too picky when I typed in "shipping" and suggested some titles and artists, which is nice - how often do you know part of a title? Happens to me pretty frequently, so I appreciate that function. After Pandora tried to get me hooked on Flogging Molly (bleh) twice, we hit the jackpot! Pandora queued up Korpiklaani - who knew I'd totally dig Scandinavian folk-metal? Awesome.

Well, personally, I'm VERY pleased with Pandora - easy to use, offers you a 'getaround' when it gives you a roadblock and I really like that it lets you click around and away from the site without losing the stream! From a work standpoint? It's a bit like Reader's Advisory for music, isn't it? Of course, I don't get an awful lot of folks asking me "what should I listen to next?" but hey, if they do, I'm ready for them!