buyreview

I had originally started this blog with the intent of reviewing things that I have bought so I could tell readers my opinion on those products. That way they could decide if it was something they would be interested in.

Today, I’m making an exception. I can do that…it’s my blog. Hehehe.

I’m still going to review something, but I didn’t have to buy anything to get it. It’s free. Free is always good, in my book.

I was looking for some music to listen to while at work the other day. I would usually use Yahoo music, but I was less than thrilled with it. I ended up not liking, or at best not being overly excited, with about three quarters of the music they played for each genre. Plus, my browser kept shutting down on me whenever it was open…but that may have been IE and not Yahoo.

Anyway, I was on the hunt for another free music program that I could use while at work. I ended up trying Pandora Radio.

I’m sure, since I am not one of those people that is on the ball about the latest whatevers, that Pandora has been around awhile. For all of you that already knew about Pandora, bear with me. I guess this post is more for the trend-challenged people like myself.

I fell in love with Pandora. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems so much better than any other music program I’ve used.

The music that they offer for your listening pleasure is a free service, as long as it is for your own personal use. Pandora is privately funded, so they don’t ask for a membership fee at all.

And it’s legal. That’s kind of a big plus for me.

You have the option to buy the music that your listening to through Pandora. You can either buy the song for your ipod or buy the album from Amazon. The way I understand it, Pandora gets a percentage of each sale that comes from their website.

Because of the way the program is set up, you can’t request songs on demand, which is kind of a bummer. But to be honest, the music that they select for you is so well chosen that it doesn’t really bother me. And it feels like I have more control over what I listen to. I like that.

To start out creating your stations, type in an artist that you feel like listening to. This will be the “seed” that starts your station. They will then create more music for your listening pleasure based on that seed artist. Their selections are top-notch, too.

I have only come across one song that they played that made me go, “eww”, but I skipped it and they very politely promised me they would never play it on that station again.

I was playing around with it this morning (while my boss wasn’t looking) and tried a few different types of music, from Patsy Cline to Hinder. I liked ‘em all. I even, just out of curiosity, threw in Tchaikovsky. They had it. I have a wide range of interests when it comes to music. I’m pretty confident that Pandora can satisfy whatever listening mood I can come up with.

I think what impressed me the most about Pandora was their welcome email when I signed up. It was very personable. It was not one of those emails that said “do not reply”…they actually said if I had a comment to reply directly to that email. That leads me to believe there’s actually a real person behind that email.

Huh…what a novel idea.

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