Tabula Rasa with Pandora
I love Pandora. Services like this are the future of music discovery. What I’d like to share, though, is an unexpected aspect of my music discovery with Pandora.
I rarely listen to the radio except for ESPN. I have historically eschewed Top 40 and “popular” music. This isn’t a conscious decision to be pretentious or douchey. I just find the content and craftsmanship of so much of the charts to be, for lack of a better word, crap. What I have found, though, is that my observations about music have clouded and prejudiced my judgement. Now, when I hear a song and I know it’s on a popular radio station, I tend to be more critical and dismiss it, even if my Kantian reaction to it is favorable.
Enter Pandora. Since I don’t listen to the radio, I don’t know what’s popular. With Pandora, a song comes on and I’m alone with that song and my opinion of it in that moment is mine alone. This is rather powerful. The first song I ever heard by Hawk Nelson was irritating sugar pop crap that I couldn’t stomach. Hated it. I formed an instant distaste for the band itself. Slowly, Pandora began to introduce them into my mixes and I would find myself headed to PandoraJam to thumbs up the song that was playing. Then, I would discover that it was Hawk Nelson. OK, even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes. But it happened several times and now, while I still don’t like that one song, I like most of the tunes I have heard. The same thing applies to Matt Nathanson’s Come on Get Higher. The first time I heard it, I liked it a lot. The other night at Wing Stop, I heard it on the radio sandwiched between Nickelback and Kelly Clarkson. Pandora helped me find a gem that I might have dismissed because of the company it was keeping.
These are just a couple examples, but evaluating music on its own, divorced from its context or any labels of “genre” or Top N lists is a good way to discover music that you might not otherwise have found or would have dismissed prematurely based on your own prejudice. Give it a try and have a truly open mind.
