Do you listen to Pandora? If not, you should. It’s an awesome service, especially if you are willing to pay for the commercial free service at $36 per year. I use Pandora on my commute via my iPhone and at home on my PC. You can also get it through various set-top devices, tablets, etc.
I got so sick of listening to commercials and talk on the radio during my commute. I am so glad I now have a way to listen to music and just music as I drive.
The idea is you provide a song, album, or artist you like and Pandora plays a bunch of similar music. You can create as many of these “stations” as you like. To expand a station’s selection of music you can add more songs, albums, or artists and Pandora will add a bunch of similar music to your station.
I create new stations all the time, whenever the whim strikes me. Many of them I listen to for a short while then discard when I find something more interesting. Some of them I keep coming back too from time to time. For example, I have one named “Hard (Leaves’ Eyes)” based on the band Leaves’ Eyes that I enjoy visiting now and again.
I also visit “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll” whenever I’m feeling nostalgic since it covers songs from many different times in my life. It has music I’ve heard on the radio, Solid Gold, Friday Night Videos, MTV, VH1, or I’ve heard on friend’s 8-track, tape, record, CD, or mp3 players. If you don’t know what an 8-track is or you think of vinyl as a soft, rubbery material instead of a hard, black disk, you may not recognize many of the songs on this station. This station covers so many decades and is so wide it does have some crap in it, but hitting fast forward a time or two usually gets it back on track.
In addition to getting to listen to all sorts of commercial free, talk free music, Pandora introduces me to lots of new music I never would have heard otherwise. Most of the music I listen to now I discovered on Pandora. I periodically just pick another song or band I like and create a new station. Every time I do I get introduced to music I never heard.