Blog #16: What did you learn about Pandora and Last FM?

Today, the class went into a computer classroom. Together we went to Pandora.com. At Pandora, we all subscribed to Pandora and built our own stations. We learned about how to add music to our stations, how to identify similar music that we like, and how to identify music that we don’t like so that it won’t come back on our stations again. We also learned how to make more than one station so that we can have our music organized.

I started listening to Pandora one summer a couple of years ago. Over the summer, I spend a lot of time in the library in Pennsylvania, where I am studying to earn my doctoral degree. In the library at my university, people are allowed to talk, eat, use their cell phones, etc. down on the bottom floor where many of the computers are. The summer I learned about Pandora, I was frustrated because the students on this floor were so loud and rude. One student sat right next to me at the computer stations and talked to her friend on a cell phone about her booty call the night before. I mean I heard WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION. Unfortunately, I got very frustrated at some point and told this girl to take her damn call outside that nobody wanted to hear about her booty call. After I freaked out, I realized that I needed to start listening to music and to keep headphones on so that I wouldn’t be so sensitive to these kinds of events. I Googled free radio stations and found Pandora.

Pandora.com is a free radio station building site. People can listen to up to 30 or 40 hours of music per month for free. I always run out of music too soon and have to use other programs to listen to music by the end of the month. Something else I think is interesting about Pandora is that they have commercials. I’m not too keen on commercials either.

Last FM is also free, but it isn’t the same as Pandora. I might just need to learn more about it, but something I learned pretty quickly is that Last FM is mostly based on music videos. The music at this site wasn’t as easy for me to control (in regard to building my station) as it was on Pandora, but Last FM did have one clear advantage. On Last FM, I was able to find any song I wanted, by any artist I wanted (as far as I could tell anyway), and choose to hear it immediately. I was NOT able to do this on Pandora. At least, if I am able to do this, I have not figured out how.