A bit of a back story:  My father and I have similar likes and dislikes when it comes to music.  I.E. classic rock, 80s hair bands, metal, you get the idea.

On Sunday whilst on the way to the bowling alley, we were in my car flipping through the stations trying to find something decent to listen to.  As always I became frustrated at the horrible amount of CRAP radio that has saturated modern radio stations lately.  Every station that claims to be “THE” Classic Rock station, is nothing more than a carbon copy of the next one, playing the same 3-4 songs from The Eagles, 38 Special, Molly Hatchet, Ozzy, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the like. Here and there they will mix in some Led Zep, or Metallica to try and appeal to the “heavier” crowd.

Sickening, because the classic rock stations around here are essentially “southern” rock with a dash of decent music thrown in.  Yeah… I may be ranting but I absolutely hate it.  

So people say: “Go buy an XM radio!” well I can’t justify that being that I only drive about 8 miles to work and don’t really travel all that much.  

But I found an alternative!!  Some time ago I was searching around for some Internet Radio, originally I was using Shoutcast stations via Winamp, but I found a similar trend, the stations played the SAME songs over and over, just like broadcast radio.  

Someone told me to try out Pandora.

All I can say is WOWZERS! The premise is:  you think of an artist, or song that you like, create a “station” using that information, and Pandora does the rest!  For example, I created a station with the band Cinderella (80s hair band), the first song it plays is a Cinderella song, then it starts playing songs from artists that are similar (Slaughter, Skid Row, Scorpions, Ratt) AND more Cinderella songs.  

The true beauty of Pandora is the ability to make your stations even better via the ability to tell the station whether you like or dislike a song on the fly. So if a song that you don’t want to hear comes up, you simply hit the thumbs down button, and Pandora will never play that song on that station again!  Vise versa, if you DO like the song, you hit the thumbs up button, and it will play more frequently. 

The simplicity of it really is what makes it so enjoyable.  I have the Pandora app on my Iphone and love it as well.  There are some advertisements on the interface, but nothing imposing or annoying.  

Go give it a shot!