Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

No one could have predicted…

Infrastructure week. at last.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

I was promised a recession.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Pandora’s Box (Open Thread)

Pandora’s Box (Open Thread)

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I think Pandora is the greatest invention of the digital age — much more consequential than stupid old Facebook, Twitter or WordPress. If you use Pandora, what are some of your favorite stations?

Here’s a snapshot of a tiny fraction of ours, which mostly indicates that we’re old. But good tunes!

20140411-183231.jpg

Please add your recs or discuss whatever.

Reader Interactions

92Comments

  2. 2.

    PopeRatzy

    Pandora sucks, play a couple tunes I like then off into crap that is completely unrelated to my choices.
    Spotify allows me to choose my music and their recommendations are actually somewhat close.

  4. 4.

    Jerzy Russian

    I usually listen to an internet radio station somewhere in The Netherlands that plays oldies. It is called “Radio “Nostalgia”, and I found it in the radio section of iTunes.

  5. 5.

    BGinCHI

    Didn’t Bill Murray predict in “Stripes” that we would all be into Tito Puente someday?

  8. 8.

    Betty Cracker

    @SatanicPanic: The mister dislikes the Beatles (thinks they’re overrated is more accurate), so I’d notice if that happened to us, but it doesn’t. Maybe because we have tons of stations and shuffle them? There’s something sucky every now and then, but mostly it’s good shit.

  9. 9.

    dr. bloor

    Hicks? Helm? Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan? We might be lost twin siblings.

    Which for you should be an extremely disturbing thought.

  10. 10.

    Dave

    Cindy Cashdollar
    Kathy Kallick Band
    Allison Krauss
    Tresa Street
    Count Basie
    Al Hirt
    Ben Hall
    Elizabeth Cook
    Remington Ride Radio
    Marty Robbins
    Speedie West
    Roy Eldridge
    Pistol Annie’s

    I’m old too!

  11. 11.

    SatanicPanic

    @Betty Cracker: Damn, well there goes my theory. I developed it after I SWEAR I put in Notorious B.I.G. as the artist and an hour later something by The Beatles came up. I could be misremembering though, that’s something I would do.

  13. 13.

    Walker

    Jack Wall

    Honestly, I listen to more video game soundtracks these days than traditional artists.

  15. 15.

    celiadexter

    Tito Puente and Bob Wills? I’m indeed impressed by your taste. That could be my iPod.
    You can find all kinds of cool music on Pandora, but just so everyone knows, they’re less than kind to musicians whose work they play. Take a look at this: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/5694958/new-pandora-ceo-faces-royalty-fight-with-artists
    Or this: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/06/23/pink-floyd-royalties-pandora-column/2447445/
    Or Google “pandora musician royalties” or similar words.
    Not to be Debbie Downer, but as the wife of a working musician (who has worked with one of the artists you list!) I strongly feel people should know this.

  16. 16.

    NotMax

    Never heard of Pandora, but then rarely listen to music anymore. And if I do, I pull out a *gasp* record or tape or switch on the radio to the classical NPR station. Don’t have any of the newer music devices, as don’t care for ear buds.

    Have been enjoying using the computer to go through the extant episodes of Vic and Sade (old time radio). Of the approximately 3600 shows done, only about 300 survive (for a few of those, the audio is so muddy that they are barely listenable). Not everyone’s cuppa tea, but if one listens enough to get into the low-key groove with it, it is both charming and surreal. Way before Seinfeld claimed the label, it really was a show about nothing. The writing, however, is so damn good and sharp and clever – a cast of 3 or 4 people bring to vivid life all the other folks they might discuss. Wikipedia page on the program.

  17. 17.

    NotMax

    Screwed up the italics. Corrected.

    Never heard of Pandora, but then rarely listen to music anymore. And if I do, I pull out a *gasp* record or tape or switch on the radio to the classical NPR station. Don’t have any of the newer music devices, as don’t care for ear buds.

    Have been enjoying using the computer to go through the extant episodes of Vic and Sade (old time radio). Of the approximately 3600 shows done, only about 300 survive (for a few of those, the audio is so muddy that they are barely listenable). Not everyone’s cuppa tea, but if one listens enough to get into the low-key groove with it, it is both charming and surreal. Way before Seinfeld claimed the label, it really was a show about nothing. The writing, however, is so damn good and sharp and clever – a cast of 3 or 4 people bring to vivid life all the other folks they might discuss. Wikipedia page on the program.

  18. 18.

    p.a.

    Replacements and REM, virtually the same station, Milladoiro, Doucet et Beausoleil, Mozart Piano Quartets.

  19. 19.

    Keith G

    Sorry Betty, but Spotify is thousands of times better. Maybe 10s of thousands of times better.

  21. 21.

    jeffreyw

    joe bonamassa
    led zep
    bonnie raitt
    jimi
    srv
    clapton
    johnny winter
    santana
    stones
    savoy brown
    ten years after
    allman bros
    ccr
    doors
    bruce
    janis
    kenny wayne shepherd
    keb mo
    tab benoit
    debbie davis
    mick clarke
    dire straits
    jonny lang

  22. 22.

    MomSense

    I am just beside myself that you like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan! When I mention him, people usually look at me like I have three heads.

    I went to a concert in the early 90s at Symphony Hall in Boston and it was one of the best musical experiences of my life. Of course I was dancing in the aisles with all of the other wild women in attendance but oh what a beautiful presence he was.

  23. 23.

    jl

    Guess I need to figure out what this thing is. After I figure out Reddit, I’ll tackle Pandora.

  24. 24.

    NotMax

    Not to harp on the subject, but this snippet from Wikipedia might nudge some others here to give the show a try:

    Once voted the best radio serial in a poll of 600 radio editors, Vic and Sade also received praise from many well-known listeners, including Ray Bradbury, Norman Corwin, Stan Freberg, Edgar A. Guest, Ogden Nash, John O’Hara, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jean Shepherd, James Thurber, Tom Lehrer and Hendrik Willem van Loon. Nash and O’Hara both compared [writer Paul] Rhymer to Mark Twain, while others made a comparison with Charles Dickens, but Rhymer defies comparison since his work is basically a sui generis. The series had an influence on the writing of Kurt Vonnegut, who called it “the Muzak of my life.”

  26. 26.

    lamh36

    @Rex Everything: Not for nothing, but I’m home in NOLA, but I’ll be in BR this weekend for my last days of work at my former job.

    I agreed to work, but man, I wish I just quit cold turkey so that I could spend this weekend at the French Quarter Festival downtown. It’s festival time in NOLA and damn near every weekend in Southeastern Louisiana, there is some kinda of festival. This weekend is the aforementioned FQFest and there is also the Strawberry Fest.

  28. 28.

    MikeJ

    @celiadexter: They’re paying tons more than radio does, and it all goes to the artists who are actually played, unlike the ASCAP/BMI model that doesn’t track actual airplay, but instead uses a complicated formula that keeps the mega stars rich and pays everybody else nothing.

  29. 29.

    srv

    I don’t think there’s really software behind Pandora. Same station plays a decidely different mix depending on the time of day.

    All those iphone builders have to be doing something off-shift in their slave cells.

    Tune in on that, JC

  32. 32.

    Ernest Pikeman

    @MomSense:

    Of course I was dancing in the aisles with all of the other wild women in attendance but oh what a beautiful presence he was.

    That must be bewildering to the players, performing in sufi muslim devotional tradition that excludes women.

  36. 36.

    Arm The Homeless

    If anyone is so inclined, check out my station titled Ball and Buscuit Radio in Pandora. I have been seeding it for nearly seven years.

  38. 38.

    Violet

    I’ve been listening to local radio stations in the car. I haven’t done that for awhile and it’s kind of fun. On one of the pop stations there was a commercial where one guy suggested going out for lunch and his co-worker said, “I can’t afford that. Did you get a raise?” To which the first guy says he refi’d his car loan and had tons of money. It was a commercial for the loan company.

    Yep. Go refi your loan and blow it on expensive meals out. They must be Republicans.

  39. 39.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    I actually invented Pandora back in the 90’s but I didn’t realize people would be interested in streaming music.

  40. 40.

    jl

    @jeffreyw: Thanks, but I still don’t understand. I can see all this great looking food, but can’t get to it. What’s the point?

  41. 41.

    lamh36

    Man cleared of NYC murder after 25 years in prison

    A man who spent almost a quarter-century behind bars for murder was freed Tuesday and cleared of a killing that happened when he was 1,100 miles away on a Disney World vacation. Jonathan Fleming was in tears as he hugged his lawyers and family in a Brooklyn courtroom. Relatives said, “Thank you, God!” after he was freed. “After 25 years, come hug your mother,” she said, and he did. Defense attorneys and prosecutors asked a Brooklyn judge to dismiss Fleming’s conviction in the 1989 shooting. A key eyewitness recanted, new witnesses have implicated someone else and a review by prosecutors turned up a hotel receipt putting Fleming in Florida hours before the killing, defense lawyers Anthony Mayol and Taylor Koss said.

    “He is elated and stunned, while tempered by the fact that he realizes that this is just the first step in getting his life back,” Koss said before the hearing. Fleming had plane tickets, videos and postcards from his trip, his lawyers said, but authorities suggested he could have been in New York at the actual time of the shooting, and a woman testified that she had seen him shoot Rush. The exoneration, first reported by the New York Daily News, comes amid scrutiny of Brooklyn prosecutors’ process for reviewing questionable convictions — scrutiny that comes partly from the new DA Kenneth Thompson himself. He unseated longtime DA Charles “Joe” Hynes last year after a campaign that focused partly on wrongful convictions on Hynes’ watch. Hynes had created a special conviction integrity unit to review false-conviction claims, but some saw the effort as slow-moving and defensive.

  42. 42.

    Bubblegum Tate

    Pandora’s royalty rates are a joke, though. Gimme my muhfuckin’ money, assholes!

  43. 43.

    Violet

    @lamh36: Saw that earlier this week. So glad he’s cleared, but what a horrible thing to happen to him. Or anyone. Our justice system is fucked up.

  46. 46.

    Tommy

    I got an ambient station I listen to almost all the time. Oh and Johnny Cash. You need the man in black from time to time.

  47. 47.

    Joseph Nobles

    @PopeRatzy: You know, the point of Pandora is when it plays something you don’t like, you can say for it not to play that anymore and it doesn’t. And when it plays something you do like, you tell it to play songs like that more and it does. And then over time, you’ve built a station. But whatever.

    I’ve got a Defying Gravity station I use at work. Broadway show tunes, some classical, movie soundtracks, Louie Armstrong and other standards singers, etc.

  49. 49.

    Mandalay

    Hot on the heels of the stepdown of Eich at Mozilla, some folks are now pre-emptively going after Condi Rice, who will be joining the board of Dropbox (or not depending on the success of the campaign).

    The campaign is using some very harsh images against Rice: a man being waterboarded, and a dead Iraqi child. I have a feeling there might be a backlash over this one.

  50. 50.

    Elizabelle

    Junior Kimbrough, re your Pandora Radio query.

    Brings up suggestions like the Black Keys and other good stuff. Just Junior by his lonesome is plenty good.

  53. 53.

    Mandalay

    @polyorchnid octopunch:

    Pretty much says it all, really.

    She certainly has a point, but that is close to the very bottom of my giving a flying fuck list. There are just a gazillion things more important.

    Read lamh36’s post #41, then try to care about Midler’s problem.

  54. 54.

    Anoniminous

    Silly scientists are saying silly science things.

    NASA released the results of a study showing that long-term planetary warming is continuing along the higher end of many projections. “All the evidence now agrees that future warming is likely to be towards the high end of our estimates, so it’s more clear than ever that we need large, rapid emissions reductions to avoid the worst damages from climate change,” lead author and NASA climatologist Drew Shindell said. If he sounds alarmist, it’s because he is, and with good reason. The NASA study shows a global increase in temperatures of nine degrees by the end of the century.

    But Al Gore is fat and Obummer is coming to take your guns. So there. Refuted.

  55. 55.

    OldDave

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:

    I’ve always claimed to have invented the “Lug-Man” back in 1971 using a ‘portable’ Sony stereo cassette deck and a pair of Sennheiser 414 headphones. The Sony was about the size of a college dictionary and quite a beast; IIRC it ran on six ‘C’ cells. After all, how many battery powered cassette decks have you seen with a 1/4″ headphone jack?

  57. 57.

    Johannes

    I created a Leonard Cohen station. Problem is, every third song is Johnny Cash. All roads, in fact, lead to Johnny Cash.

  60. 60.

    Hungry Joe

    @dr. bloor: I heard Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks at the Family Dog in San Francisco in (I think) 1971, and I’m still waiting to hear something better. Sid Page is God.

    (Actually, at a beer joint in Nova Scotia a few years ago I heard a pickup trio that included a guy from Newfoundland on accordion, and they might have been better. Might.)

  62. 62.

    Joseph Nobles

    @Anoniminous: I think it’s going to take something like losing Miami for conservatives to figure this out. Even Jim DeMint will have to recognize that South Florida has become part of the Gulf.

  65. 65.

    max

    @Joseph Nobles: You know, the point of Pandora is when it plays something you don’t like, you can say for it not to play that anymore and it doesn’t. And when it plays something you do like, you tell it to play songs like that more and it does. And then over time, you’ve built a station. But whatever.

    But that’s my point. Every time I’ve tried to work with Pandora and build a station, I pick a song I like, it plays that and maybe two or three more and then it insists on playing shit I don’t want on that channel and it’s very very persistent about playin’ shit I don’t want to hear on that station.

    Amazon’s recommendation engine has the same problem – I can kick it repeatedly telling it all the shit I don’t want and it’ll start to shape up a bit and I’ll click something or buy something and it’s all fucked up again.

    (That is, if I indicate an interest in history books, it wants to give me every book on that one subject and then it insists on suggesting things like fucking Bill O’Reilly. Telling it I do not wish the Bill O’Reilly doesn’t matter – apparently lots of people want Bill O’Reilly so I must want Bill O’Reilly. And even if it gets that I don’t want Bill O’Reilly, it decides that must mean I want Ann Coulter. No, I want history books, not conservative agitprop. The current mess is that I bought a Willie Nelson record for my mother and an Allman Brother’s CD for my stepdad, and now it insists on trying to feed me every Willie Nelson record in the known universe, never mind that I have separate wish lists containing nothing but music (60 or 70 cds) and Willie Nelson is nowhere to be found. You’d think it would figure out not to try to feed me that stuff, based on my wishlists, but the most recent sale predominates over everything and to hell with what I like. This must be bad for overall sales, but I guess they really really want to sell me some Ann Coulter.)

    On the other hand, the first time I signed up for Songza, it took me an entire sixty seconds to find me a station I liked and kept playing stuff I liked without having to fiddle with it, unlike Pandora where I have to click over and punch it in the face every ten minutes.

    (I have noticed all this today because I have to go to every site and change my fucking password. At least Songza is consoling me with a good station.

    max
    [‘There has to be some way to use the Amazon recommendation engine to hammer the NSA with awfulness.’]

  67. 67.

    NotMax

    @OldDave

    1971? Occasionally carried around a Uher brand portable reel-to-reel player/recorder. Came in a nifty leather case with a shoulder strap. Plugged in my David Clark headphones (still reliable today) to listen in privacy.

    Remember one time listening to something or other while on the train from Philly to New York City. People stared as if I had just landed from the Moon.

  69. 69.

    p.a.

    I find I use Sky.fm more than Pandora. Had Spotify for about a week. Think I dumped it because of incessant emails.

  70. 70.

    burnspbesq

    MOG. Which is going away soon, to become Beats Music, which I fear will suck, because Beats headphones are the worst crap ever made for listening to music.

    Eclectic 24 is da bomb. I will have it on in the car all day, all four days when I drive to Seattle and back in early May to retrieve the kid from school.

  71. 71.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Mandalay: Given Dropbox’s valutaion, this could get interesting-especially since Robert Gates and Stephen Hadley are also on Dropbox’s board-curiously, tho, the drop Dropbox website doesn’t mention that little tidbit.

  74. 74.

    worn

    Betty –

    Seeing Bob Wills at the top of your list nearly made me swoon. After all these years he’s still The King. But I’m sure you already know that…

  75. 75.

    Adam Jonas Waldorf

    I have to chime in to completely disagree about Pandora. Pandora’s influence, as well as Spotify, is one that limits musical knowledge. If free two services don’t have a piece of music then for many people it doesn’t exist. To lose the entirety of many great artists catalogs to technology is a great tragedy.

  76. 76.

    CONGRATULATIONS!

    Pandora sucks unless you like Pink Floyd.

    If you like Pink Floyd and nothing but Pink Floyd, these are your guys.

  79. 79.

    CONGRATULATIONS!

    I have to chime in to completely disagree about Pandora. Pandora’s influence, as well as Spotify, is one that limits musical knowledge. If free two services don’t have a piece of music then for many people it doesn’t exist. To lose the entirety of many great artists catalogs to technology is a great tragedy.

    @Adam Jonas Waldorf: This is one of the two legit objections I have to these services, the other of course being the reduction of artist revenues to something a feudal lord would be ashamed to admit paying anyone.

    Once you throw those tunes down the memory hole they don’t come back.

    We’ve seen this time and time again when formats change – 78 to LP, LP to CD, CD to mp3, mp3 to streaming services. Every time we do another change, we lose about 80% of the music that was available on the last format because it is not profitable to convert it.

  80. 80.

    luc

    I do regard the Condi Rice appointment to the dropbox board as a personal insult.
    Can anybody imagine a more ridiculous appointment; yes, they could also add John Yoo (why not?).
    We want more of these privacy advocates in the tech industry?
    Not that I ever paid dropbox – but I am leaving.
    http://www.drop-dropbox.com/
    I am not trusting my data to a company run be complete idiots.

  81. 81.

    Howard Beale IV

    @luc: Understand that the Dropbox co-founder who made the decision to put Condi on the board is allegedly worth a cool $1.5 billion-now Eich and Mozilla? Now that’s was just walking around money.

    Especially since a massive petrol tanker was named after her-oddly fitting, given what we now know, eh?

  82. 82.

    Howard Beale IV

    @CONGRATULATIONS!:

    We’ve seen this time and time again when formats change – 78 to LP, LP to CD, CD to mp3, mp3 to streaming services. Every time we do another change, we lose about 80% of the music that was available on the last format because it is not profitable to convert it.

    Correction: Every time we try to convert to a new format its the storage media that we will not be able to retrieve the data from. At least with a LP I can still play it with a decent turntable and a decent cartridge a few times before I do permanent damage-and that’s assuming the record wasn’t pressed from crappy re-ground vinyl that sounds like sandpaper when played. With many of the original analog master tapes the tape oxide binders have flaked off and are unplayable/unrecoverable, and the first several generations of digital recorders no longer exist.

  83. 83.

    James E. Powell

    I don’t recall if I got The Beatles on every station I created, but I do know that I always got songs and artists that were not related to the original. Or at least not related in any way that I could figure out.

  84. 84.

    polyorchnid octopunch

    @Mandalay: I’m a professional musician, and have been for nearly three decades now. This is (one part) of my living and how I support my kids you’re talking about here. It used to be the only part of it, but that stopped being viable a long time ago.

    I still work a lot (I’m not the most workingest guitarist in my town, but I’m definitely in the top five), but I made better money in real terms with less gigs in the nineties than I do now.

    What do you do for a living?

  87. 87.

    luc

    @Howard Beale IV:
    I really did not care about the Eich thing at Mozilla.
    –
    To correct myself: either Dropbox company is currently run by complete idiots (despite their impressive wealth) – or the bosses are only interested in influence-peddling, completely disregarding integrity (…. and are still idiots).

  88. 88.

    Central Planning

    I realize this thread is probably dead, but the Delta Blues channel on Pandora is pretty nice

  89. 89.

    RSR

    If you like Pandora, or the concept of Pandora, I’d suggest trying Slacker as well.

    Slacker allows pretty detailed fine tuning of stations as well as the ability to give a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ to individual songs or ban an artist completely from a station.

    I haven’t used Pandora in many years, so I’m not really comparing one to the other, just mentioning another option.

  92. 92.

    JulieF

    Hey never heard of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan but just added him to my pandora list. Interesting cuz I’m in Pakistan now….

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