Pandora Radio

I’m a big fan of Pandora Radio. I had heard of it, right around when it started, ish, as an offshoot of the Music Genome Project. I never checked it out, because one time I tried to use the MGP (Music Genome Project is just too long to write out again, and look at me – I’ve turned into Rachel Ray, explaining what “EVOO” means every time I say “EVOO”) and I did not get it. I’m really not very good at 3-D stuff. One of my dream jobs is to be a builder. A builder of what? Anything. I work across from an art museum, and whenever they have a new exhibit opening up, the guys who do the installations come in and get coffee and stuff. Every time, I want to yell, “take me with you!” to them, not only to help me escape the drudgery of having to serve coffee to assholes, and smile while I do it, but also to get to build stuff. It doesn’t hurt that all the guys seem really cool with their painty clothes and sawdust in their hair and messily hand-rolled cigarettes, and one of them is really cute and probably straight (this is an important distinction, because most of the cute guys from the museum ping my gaydar at least a little, although I always hope that it’s just me stereotyping guys who work at an art museum). Mostly, I want these guys to teach me how to build stuff and hang paintings because I can barely tack a poster to the wall. I’m very two-dimensional in my thinking. And that’s why the Music Genome Project scared me and I didn’t understand it. Pandora is way easier to get though.

Back to my work. I work at a coffeeshop. It’s a small local chain. It desperately wants to be Starbucks. It’s kind of sad, actually. It’s like in Mean Girls, when the mean girl says, “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen.” I kind of want to sit down the guys who own my company and say that to them. But they pay me, so as long as the small bucks keep rolling in, I’ll shut up and put up. In my company’s quest to fit into the coffee big boys club, they have a company radio station on Live365 that all the stores are supposed to play. IT IS TERRIBLE. There are not words to describe how bad it is, although in the nearly two years I’ve worked there, I’ve grown accustomed to it. Actually, it’s not that the whole thing is terrible, the station is generally kind of stupid and nothing to really notice. But then every once in a while there is a song that comes on that just makes you wish you were being pecked to death by rabid birds, because at least your screams might distract you from how bad that song is. So a few months ago, my then-boss threw caution to the wind and set up a Pandora station for the store.

Work became so much more fun. It’s hard to believe that injecting some Tegan and Sara into your workday can make a difference, but it totally can. If you are miserable at work, play If It Was You for 10 minutes a day (interspersed among other, similar artists throughout the day), and see how much happier you become! Maybe it was all coincidence, but we were also busier, making more money, and making more tips. I think it’s because everyone loves Feist. We built this really awesome station, based on Feist, but with a little bit of what everyone liked (except for this one girl who’s too busy wearing skinny jeans to like good music, and said that she hates Tegan and Sara because their vocals are too harmonic and their songs sound “good.” Seriously). Through this station, I was introduced to the wonderful world of Pandora, and the band the Sounds. I had previously written them off as terrible without ever really hearing them, because they appeal to the kinds of people that like Cobra Starship, since the girl from the Sounds was in the Snakes on a Plane video. But they’re actually pretty good!

So Pandora has been really good to me, making my workdays more fun and more productive (monetarily, at least), and also introduced me to some cool bands. But it really proved its worth when I got a new boss. My old boss has left our store to open a new one, a store that I will hopefully be working in in about two weeks when it opens. She was replaced with this guy who… well, to be diplomatic I’ll say he could stand to improve a little. He’s this totally obnoxious frat guy type who complains loudly about the music we’re supposed to play. He talks about how it’s really hard for him to listen to that kind of stuff, because he really likes music, it’s his whole life, but then he mentions that Coldplay is his favorite band. So how much does he really like music? He’s set up like 10 Pandora stations for himself, because he doesn’t quite get how to edit a station. Instead of making one station that plays Weezer, Silverchair, and Coldplay, he sets up 3 separate stations.

I love playing pranks, but I’m not very good at them. I laugh too much. I giggle a lot anyway, but if I’ve played a prank on someone, I can’t keep a straight face for the rest of the day. But I thought of an amazing one, and it took my boss a full day to figure out – it was only when he caught me actually doing it, that he finally figured out what I was doing and how. See, with Pandora, you create a station with “seeds,” either artists or songs that you want the station based on. It’s so easy. I seeded all of his stations with different artists from the company radio – Ella Fitzgerald, Enya, stuff like that. I also infused his Nine Days (who I’ve never even heard of before but they’re terrible and apparently he likes them a lot) with Barry Manilow and his Foo Fighters with Neil Diamond. And it was awesome.

If you don’t have a boss that you prank by ruining his life with terrible music, you can enjoy what is actually my favorite Pandora function. You can ask why it plays any song that it plays. Here are a few examples, all from my station “Twee As Fuck.”

In closing, if you feel like it, you can totally listen to my stations, or you can make your own. My only complaint is that last.fm can’t be updated with Pandora songs, but last.fm has also made their tuner more Pandora-y, so it might be okay to use.