More overstimulated

For me, Pandora continues to be the best way to get my music, and it keeps getting better. Pandora is an internet music service located at www.pandora.com. It’s been around a few years. It's free.

You go there, set up an account and log in, then type in the name of a group or a song. It asks you a question or two, then sets up a station. Right now I’m listening to my station based on Todd Hildreth, who’s a piano player and teacher I met in an internet group. I added Michael Brecker and John Scofield to expand the range a little and Pandora starts streaming songs by these artists and other similar ones. If I like a song I can click a thumbs up and it plays more songs like that. If I don’t like a song, I click thumbs down and it doesn’t play that song any more.

In other words, the station learns. Over time, it gets closer and closer to music I’m going to like. There’s a danger that it could over-stimulate the pleasure centers of my brain.

I’ve added several other stations representing different styles of music I like. I can also listen to shared stations other people have set up. You can listen to my stations, but at any given time, we’re actually listening to different songs.

Wow.

The range of available music is astonishing. My Luciana Souza station has introduced me to dozens of musicians from a variety of Latin American coutries and styles.

Even more astonishing is that every song is individually listened to by Pandora people and “hand coded,” so to speak, in dozens of criteria. I have no idea how they accomplish this. Pandora is produced by The Music Genome Project. Again, I have no idea.

Pandora has added new features lately that make it even better. Click here, it says, to go to a biography of this artist. Click there to go to album information, including side men and a song list. Click in that place if you want to buy the CD from Amazon or download from iTunes.

They’ve also added classical music, though I haven’t tried that so can’t say anything about its quality.

Downside? I miss a good announcer, but then there are very few good announcers. If you find a good late-night jazz DJ, it’s like you’re the two hippest guys on the planet and this is your time together. Pandora is like listening to a computer. It’s a very hip computer, but still.

I’ve also stopped listening to my public radio station except for the news sometimes. I really should send them a check anyway.