Thursday, February 26, 2009

Music Renaissance

2008 was the Year of the Podcast, at least as far as I was concerned. Other than the occasional children's CD, I didn't spend very much time listening to music...I did the podcast thing. Religious podcasts, sports podcasts, youth ministry podcasts, comedy podcasts...I became obsessed; often uploading 4-5 hours of new podcasts each day. That's a lot of listening to people talk!

Early last week, I was reminded about Pandora (the free Internet source for the Music Genome project). For some reason or another, I thought it had been shut down a year ago...but, clearly, I was wrong. The premise is simple. Just type in a song title, band name, or music genre...and let Pandora do the rest. You get commercial-free for as long as you're at your computer.

I used to be frustrated that Pandora would play one song that I liked ever 20-30 minutes. They would pump me full of songs that weren't all that good, but were by bands that I liked. However, that has not been the case in my most recent experience with Pandora. It's got me listening to music about 3-4 hours a day...and has reminded me why I wanted to study music in the first place.

Here is my list of "radio stations" I have created.
  • Simon & Garfunkel
  • *NSync
  • The Beatles
  • Chris Rice
  • James Taylor
  • Giovanni Pierluigi di Palestrina
  • Damien Rice

Do you do Pandora? What are your thoughts? Are there other / better Internet radio sources that you prefer?

2 comments:

  1. I don't use Pandora, however, I noticed you have a Palestrina station, and couldn't help but sigh a little and remember how much I didn't enjoy learning about him because I had a horrible teacher for that class.

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  2. Yeah - it's frustrating how one bad teacher can derail a class. My Palestrina channel is for Sunday afternoons when I need to just be at peace in between worship / Sunday School / Youth Group. Ha!

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