Music to Your Ears

Most of you know that I am a true music lover. I have recently learned of three great sites that you might enjoy. The first is pandora.com-a kind of music-on-demand site that allows patrons to create what are referred to as "Radio Stations" based on differing musical styles. Pandora typically plays a tune from the artist or band you specify. Then the Pandoran powers that be go out into musicland and fetch songs from other artists that you might find equally enjoyable. This is particularly nice for those who aren't afraid to try something a little different within the same genre. Depending on how you feel about the song that's chosen, you can give it either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down which will fine-tune Pandora's selection process. Next is a site called deezer.com. Deezer is unique in that it works more in database form. Simply type the artist name you are looking for in the search box and a complete list will appear of all available songs from the artist. One can often find full albums of songs ready to stream for listening pleasure. Deezer can get away with offering so many titles because users cannot download any of the songs. Recently, however, Deezer has experienced difficulty with music distributors which has somewhat limited their menu. They still have a great selection of tunes to stream. Finally, I will introduce you to slacker.com. Slacker is a fresh, user-friendly site that works much like Pandora, but without the emphasis on experimentation. Like Pandora, Slacker works through the creation of radio stations, but the stations stay much truer to form than Pandora. Furthermore, the audio quality is fantastic and there is hardly an artist that one cannot find. I recommend creating accounts for all these stations. It's free, and all of the data from your searching efforts will be saved. Give these sites a try and let me know what you find.