Do you have a favorite "station" on Pandora.com?

The Shins

@toomuchcoffee911 oh, yeah. The Shins are great. Have they put out anything newer than Wincing the Night Away?

I have several jazz stations I listen to, based on music by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. There are no jazz stations in my part of the country, so Pandora is the place to find great jazz.

@toomuchcoffee911 the shinns! I love em!

@camouflage_pants, thanks, that’s a good idea. I need to start getting more acquainted with jazz. Coltrane would be a great starting place, too.

The Jimmy Cliff channel on Slacker.

@AstroChuck, thanks for Slacker.com, too. I hadn’t known about that one.

I love Pandora. We have a Netflix-and-Pandora-enabled Blu-Ray player (Samsung BDP 1600) that lets you play your Pandora channels on the home entertainment system. So it’s sort of like watching audio TV—the TV shows what’s playing, the remote control lets you thumbs-up or thumbs-down or skip, and there’s no advertising to look at (and no charges).

Lest that seem like just bragging about my toy instead of answering the question, let me say that the Ben Folds channel always seems to bring interesting things my way. They all do, really.

@HasntBeen, oh my. I hadn’t bought my HDTV and Blu-Ray player yet. I think you just helped to make up my mind: It’s time! That sounds very cool, especially since I’m just listening to the music on the laptop speakers. It’s better than nothing, but you can measure “how much better” with the thumb and index finger of one hand.

I’ll have to check out Ben Folds, too. Thanks.

Ben Folds is cool. At first, he’s completely unimpressive… thin, boyish voice, perhaps even sounds a bit insipid. But if you stay with it, you see the other layers—he’s hilarious, dark, witty, and a massive piano player and songwriter. It’s sort of like driving past the same little Italian grocer every day of your life and then one day learning that it’s the Mafia headquarters.

I’d lost track of pop music (in the broadest sense of that term) since the mid/late 90s when I gave up on radio and became a classical music fiend. I went kinda wild when I discovered Pandora. I toyed around with using my favorite U2 songs as seeds at first, but the results weren’t that great (Tonic? Jets to Brazil?). I went through something of a (thankfully brief) nu-metal phase. I got into Muse heavily for a while (I still think they’re OK, though I tend to like their earlier stuff better now). Somehow I eventually cobbled together a station with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Black Keys, The White Stripes and The Brian Jonestown Massacre as artist seeds and it was great. It would go from playing indie rock to blues rock to straight blues to psychedelic rock. This station was the one where I heard The Boxer Rebellion for the first time.

Eventually I got turned on to last.fm and I began spending less time listening to Pandora. Pandora’s radio is much better, but last.fm’s trump card is the community. Also my own music collection started to swell with my finds.

Skinny Puppy station.

Cocteau Twins station.

Lily Allen.
Radiohead.
Atmosphere.
Muse.
The Counting Crows.

@hiphiphopflipflapflop, thanks much for that answer. Pandora does have a community of sorts. I’ve almost never used it, but that would have been a good place for me to go with this Q, too.

When I’m studying: Miles Davis.

Other times: Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, J. Geils Band, and some others (but those are the most common)

@CyanoticWasp “Pandora does have a community of sorts.” It’s there in a way but it’s rare for people to interact there. I’ve never given nor gotten a single “shout” at Pandora. My last.fm profile now has almost five hundred shouts.

@hiphiphopflipflapflop, okay. Thanks again. I guess it’s a good thing that I haven’t tried to interact with the ‘community’ at Pandora, then. (They’re too much like me in that regard, I suppose. I’ve lived in this house for seven years now, and I’ve met and talked to my neighbor about… four or five times (maybe), probably 25 words or less. And I don’t even know his name. At least we’re friendly; he snow-blows the sidewalk in front of my house if he’s out with the blower before I am, and I do the same at his house if I beat him.)

Another great band Pandora turned me on to is The Chameleons. The best results I’ve had from a station with just a single seed is one based on The Meeting Places.

Powderfinger! Wow, I had completely forgotten about them! Thank you so much!

My favorite station is Can radio. That one got me into Iggy Pop, Caravan, the Chocolate Watchband, the 13th Floor Elevators, and Lindisfarne. All of whom are now among my favorite music. So hooray for Can! And Pandora, of course.

@AstroChuck, I just realized that Slacker.com also adds the Artist / Song information to the Firefox tab on my desktop, so I can see who’s doing what just by glancing at that, without having to click into the window. Excellent! I’ve always wanted this from Pandora.

I dunno why, I got Wincing the Night Away by The Shins and it did nothing for me, really. Every recommendation engine (Amazon, iTunes…) had been throwing that one out at me for a while. Music is a funny thing.

That old station of mine I mentioned above was probably the one that introduced me to my favorite delta bluesman, Mississippi Fred McDowell.

Somebuddy should repeal the law that says all blues musicians must be named after water

On Pandora, it’s called Torch Song Radio. I am having trouble linking it.
It’s slow music from Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and many others.

I just discovered Pandora when I got my Blackberry. I haven’t listened to my mp3 player since. Normally my favorite station is “Holla Back Girl” its like a bunch of Gwen Stefani and Nelly Furtado type stuff. Its not what I would normally choose but it turns out I kinda like it! Also I am listening to “Santa Baby” which plays a lot of like Perry Como and Dean Martin type Christmas music. I love it!