Internet Radio

Around 2001, the accountant at the recording studio I was working at and I both applied for a job describing music for an upstart website. She got the job; I didn’t- which turned out to be a blessing because the company didn’t actually have any money so everybody was working for no pay. All I needed was another volunteer position!

Fast-forward a few years, and Pandora is doing pretty well for itself. For those of you who don’t know, www.pandora.com is a website that allows you to choose artists or songs from which it creates a “radio” station of similar music. You can include multiple performers or songs in each radio station you create, which is essential for preventing the station from becoming repetitive.

I have been using Pandora for a few years now. In fact, I am currently listening to “Allauddin Khan Radio.” When I first tried to create this station, there was no Hindustani music to speak of; mostly horrible World fusion. This could have been my fault, as the first names I used in creating the station were Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain. Now, their northern Indian classical section is larger than I would have expected.

Unfortunately, one can only listen to 40 hours of Pandora per month for free, even though it is riddled with advertisements and commercials. Fortunately, there are other internet radio stations. Last.fm, which has no listening restrictions, is even better than Pandora. Last.fm seems to have a larger underground music database. Although I think it’s possible, I’ve never bothered to figure out how to link artists with Last.fm, which is a credit to the site as Pandora would be unbearable without the artist links.

Last.fm does not have a pause button, which is annoying. It also does not automatically start playing when you go to the website, as Pandora does, and often crashes while trying to play the annoying commercial before the station starts. Last. Fm doesn’t play commercials between songs as Pandora does. It keeps track of every song you’ve ever played on it, but I’m not sure what the benefit of this is. On Last.fm you can comment on tracks (like on youtube), and if you click on the name of a commenter, you can see their listening history, which is actually kind of creepy, but useful for getting a chance to listen to bands others are constantly listening to but you’ve never heard of.

Pandora generally leans toward popular music. My “Tool Radio” station, for example, is lame- it plays a bunch of Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana- none of which have much in common with Tool other than being early ‘90’s band that gained huge popularity. The “Tool Radio” for Last.fm, however, plays much more relevant artists such as Opeth, Indukti and Isis. Of course, you also get crap like Peach and Deftones which is just grating and completely unwanted. Both Tool stations play Soundgarden, but Pandora plays their shit like “Black Hole Sun” whereas Last.fm plays awesome Soundgarden such as “The Day I Tried To Live.” Last.fm seems a bit more aware of member ties; thus they’ll play ASHES dIVIDE (sic as far as I’m concerned; pet peeve) and Pandora won’t.

I listen to a wide variety of music. Some other artist names I frequently use to create radio stations are: El Lebrijano (flamenco), Albert Ayler (post-Coltrane jazz), Art Ensemble of Chicago (avant garde), Thelonious Monk (bebop), Charles Mingus (music), Busoni or Debussy (classical piano), Slayer (heavy metal), Blind Lemon Jefferson or Skip James (blues) and Buckethead (guitar).