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practicalsolutions · 11 hours

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Does anybody else remember Pandora? Not the box, or the fictional planet where James Cameron's blue alien cat people live where there's a literal mineral called "unobtanium" that can only be harvested from that particular planet. My man literally called that shit "unobtanium," fucking portmanteau of "unobtainable" and the "-ium" suffix for newer elements. No. That has absolutely nothing to do with anything else I'm writing beyond this point. This is a post about music.

This is a post about the customizable internet radio station Pandora. And also it's going to briefly cover ClickRadio, it's going to talk about my experiences with YouTube Music, Spotify, my own iPod and how I find and listen to music, and how it's a core part of my creative process and I put a bunch of music references in pretty much all of my creative work. None of it being musical, by the way. I can barely carry a tune and I can't play any instruments more complicated than a kazoo.

It also got really long and rambly, look, I'm high, I'm sorry. You've been warned.

It's 2001. I'm in high school. My life looks like this drawing I made a few weeks ago.

Music is a big part of my life. The internet was a lot slower. It would take several minutes to download an .mp3 file of a song that was only about three and a half minutes long, so I would listen to the radio a lot. But the thing about listening tuning into radio is that it's not the internet. You can't pick which song to listen to whenever you want. If you want that, your best bet is to own the songs you want on their physical CD releases, or risk exposing your mom's computer to a million viruses. But in order to skip a song, you have to press a physical button to skip a song. And of course, if you're listening to the radio where you can discover new songs, you can't skip the latest Limp Bizkit or Disturbed track with the vain hope that maybe they'll play "One-Armed Scissor" by At The Drive-In or "Go With the Flow" by Queens of the Stone Age, or any single off of Kid A. Everything you hated the most, hated more than Britney Spears or the Backstreet Boys, was all lumped together under the formless "alternative rock" label, which weirdly included hip-hop artists like Eminem, House of Pain, Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, Gorillaz and Outkast; all stuff that I guess radio stations looked at and thought "yeah, this can appeal to white people."

You know I heard Dynamite Hack's version of "Boyz N The Hood" before I ever heard Eazy-E's? That should be a crime. That should be considered a human right's violation. Fuck you, Dynamite Hack for introducing the entire world to the concept of ironic hipster covers hip-hop songs which led to the fucking white people with ukeleles versions of Tupac songs. I am so glad that we, as a society, have all come together against these dynamite hacks and decided this was cringe and something that belongs in the past.

But this isn't an essay on awful YouTube music trends of the early 2010's, this is listening to music in the internet age in the early 2000's.

In 2001, ClickRadio launched. It was a desktop application that allowed you to listen to radio stations via the internet, but it had something real radio stations did not; if a song like, say, Dynamite Hack's cover of "Boys N The Hood" came on, you could click a thumbs down button and it would let out this cartoonishly loud "thud" and then that station would never play that song for you again. And if they played a song you really liked? You could click a thumb's up button and it would play that song more often.

I cannot understate how fucking mindblowing an idea this was in the early 2000's. Yes, ClickRadio would slow down your computer as the Neopets Flash games you would play gringing for Neopoints to get a Halloween brush for your Lupe that you named after a member of your favorite band. Anybody else do that?

No? Just me? Okay then.

ClickRadio would quickly get enshittificated, within only about a year or two being filled with more and more unskippable ads. I went back to just loading up MP3s in Winamp and playing music that way by the time I was in college, but it was a pain having to listen to whatever song I had physically on my hard drive, or a few years later, going to YouTube to see if somebody uploaded a crusty version of a NoMeansNo song with a Spanish-speaking DJ speaking in the opening bits of the video. Not ideal.

But then Pandora showed up.

I don't remember where I first heard about Pandora, but after Napster, there were a bunch of music start-ups hoping to be legitimate in the eyes of artists and record labels. Clickradio was just a radio station. But Pandora... was an experiment of The Algorithm.

You see, Pandora started what is known as the Music Genome Project, a way of organizing music into hundreds of different subgenres across five large umbrella genres; Pop/Rock, Hip Hop/Electronica, Jazz, World Music and Classical. What Pandora did was use this as a way to allow users to craft their own custom radio stations. And not only would it play the stuff you liked, but it would be tailored to a seed artist or song; you put in Nirvana, you get a lot of 90's alt rock radio faire, but then maybe it plays Mudhoney. Maybe it plays Sonic Youth. Maybe it plays Melvins, and you like it. And when you give a thumbs up, you hear more and more artists in similar subgenres. And let's say you've been looking into obscure or underground music for years before you start using Pandora, and suddenly you're introduced to artists you never would have come across more organically. And buddy, you'd bet my Pandora station was a fucking hodgepodge of hundreds of seeds, which allowed me to discover highly influential /mu/ core bands like Swans, Animal Collective and Neutral Milk Hotel, but also bands that are so obscure that their Spotify listens are in the lower four digits at maximum and maybe a couple tens of thousands of views on YouTube. So many songs I found through Pandora are from bands that I very rarely hear a lot of people talk about, but they've made songs that have just lived in my brain for decades.

And for a couple years, I'd be listening to Pandora radio while writing up new TF2 fanfiction to terrorize TF2chan with. Certain songs would come up so often because I specifically bookmarked them. I didn't really know a lot about shoegaze before Pandora, but now I own a physical copy of all three of Slowdive's albums, and you fucking bet "When the Sun Hits" was in heavy rotation while I was writing Respawn of the Dead.

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Yes, this was playing while I was writing out Respawn of the Dead, chapter by chapter. And so was "Beautiful Plateau" by Sonic Youth, "The Sound" by Swans, "Dead Flag Blues" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and "End of the Line" by Murder By Death. And also this song by a band called The Clock Work Army, which split up and reformed into another band called Calico Horses, and I know this because I found this out while trying to track down a song that would play constantly on my Pandora station and it has, as of writing this sentence, 2,588 listens. And it might have more by the time you read this because I might just put it on loop because oh my god, I love this song so much, it hits so perfect for me, why don't more people know about this song?

It's not on YouTube, where I usually tend to listen to music, since I'll go through a rotation of songs that I call "work songs." I put on music while I write, and some songs are just so perfect that I can listen to them on loop with a very select number of songs that just never, ever get old for me. My neurons in my brain light up as though I was hearing it again for the first time.

Swans, Sigur Ros and The Dillinger Escape Plan are all artists who I found through Pandora that I've had the privilege to see live. By the time I was just discovering bands because I had a bunch of friends and mutuals with similar taste in music to mine, Pandora was slowly getting more and more ads. It was getting to the point where the free service would, if you were lucky, play only three or four songs before playing an ad. And when the length of those songs can span anywhere from less than three minutes for much of my beloved 80's and early 90's punk, to up to a half an hour for post-rock, noise, or ambient music. And the number of ads that played between songs had increased. What was just one every half an hour or so was now two to three for what could potentially be only after seven minutes of music. Pandora really doesn't like it if the music you like includes a lot of songs that are longer than an episode of The Simpsons.

I never hear anybody talk about Pandora anymore. Spotify is THE name in internet music streaming, and it favors listens of entire albums and other people's playlists. I don't like Spotify; sometimes I just want a specific song from a specific album. I could make a playlist of these "work songs," but I like when YouTube notices that I'm listening to music, and in the recommendeds, there's another song that I've listened to on repeat. Why yes, I would like you to play "Classical Homicide" by Dälek for me again. What's that? An hour loop of Deadmau5's "Professional Griefers" featuring Gerard Way? Yes please. I apologize for nothing. That dude's way better than Skrillex.

God, do you guys remember the Deadmau5/Skrillex shipping that was all over Tumblr in the early 2010's. I remember it. I remember it so hard. Everybody shipping them and the members of Daft Punk, posting Steam Powered Giraffe (blech) and Die Antwoord (lol) on my dashboard. In Die Antwoord's defense, they had some pretty funny music videos.

I got AdBlocker for YouTube, so the ads aren't a problem there. I mean, I could make a playlist for Spotify of my go-to songs, but I'd have to deal with ads. And there's something nice about YouTube's robots that sell my precious data to faceless corporations at least having the courtesy to be like "You look like you could use another stream of 'Anything (Viva!)' by Foetus. Or Scraping Foetus off the Wheel. Or... whatever, fuck it, it's J.G. Thirwell's band, okay? It's the guy that does the music for Venture Brothers."

Foetus was introduced to me through a friend but it was Pandora serving me up more of their music that made their albums "nail" and "Flow" ones that got the honor of Being Downloaded onto my iPod so I can Listen to This in my Car. I still use my iPod and even if there's albums that I haven't gone back to in years on there, I like having them there. I haven't listened to the soundtrack for Panty and Stocking in ages but having access to it so that I can FLY AWAY NOW, FLY AWAY NOW, FLY AWAAAYYYY on a long drive? I like having that option.

I still buy CDs so I can burn albums onto my iPod. My iPod doesn't have ads and switching between artists doesn't mean I have to flip through a CD binder. I also try to buy albums off of Bandcamp. Especially for smaller artists, or artists whose work I love enough to want to give them my money. I don't want to listen to ads. It throws off my workflow, shakes me out of the trance-like state that is pure, focused creativity. Whether it's working on comics or thinking about things I want to do in those comics, I'm usually listening to music. Sometimes the same album, hundreds of times over. I admit I haven't listened to that much King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, but I've listened to Nonagon Infinity front to back more times than I can count.

Nowadays it feels like I don't have a lot of friends who share my taste in music. I've so fully entrenched myself in fandom circles that I've been exposed to the average person's taste in music and I'm like "oh yeah, most people aren't as big of a fucking nerd about this as you are." You know how hard it is to get people who aren't music nerds to get into The Residents? Everybody I know that likes them already knew about them before we met, and people who had never heard of them before they met me usually find them deeply weird and never get fucking obsessed with them like I have. I own a physical copy of, not their original version of their album The King and Eye, which is an entire album of them covering Elvis that sounds like this, but the fucking remix of that album that does shit like this to their covers of Elvis songs. And you know what? I love both versions, but that remix of their cover of "Surrender" is a work song.

Listening to music is the only way I can guarantee that I'm actually working on something and not playing with my phone. I guess what I'm saying is... it sure would be nice if Pandora existed like it did back then right now.

Especially because I stopped cleaning up a page of my horrible Deltarune fan comic (MASSIVE Dead Dove warning, not even kidding, the entire story hinges on some very upsetting topics) just to write all this down and make sure there were links to every song in this essay. And like... I've even used the comic as a not-so-clandestine way into tricking them into listening to my music before. Whether it be directly namedropping bands and songs, writing about a specific character's taste in music and using that in the story somehow, or literally just making the title of one of my comic installments... this.

It is really good. 686 listens on YouTube. Absolutely criminal. And the example above? That's me not putting in hundreds of references into the comic and wondering if anybody else has noticed them.

I guess what I'm saying is that I am a huge music nerd, even though I always feel like I'm getting into artists super late (unless they're like Death Grips, but that was only after The Money Store had come out), but I fucking hate Spotify. I want more physical releases that can be preserved digitally, and I don't have the money to get into collecting vinyls as a hobby. All the vinyl I own is toys, and uh... I own a lot of those.

Thank you for reading through pure, uncut music autism mixed in with nostalgia and griping about capitalism because that's apparently where my head is at all the time when I'm not daydreaming my little stories or making up video essays in my head that will never be made. That's why I do stream of consciousness Tumblr essays full of minute details that absolutely are not necessary, but this is how my goddamn ADHD brain works. Now you know what it's like to be in my Discord server.

That post is, of course, pinned in the music channel.

As it should be.

... Fuck Pandora, I don't even fuck with it no more, I miss Grooveshark, weh, my playlist on that site was eight hours long before they shut it down in 2014. Devastated. I was in the middle of using it when it went offline.

Okay now I'm done for real, sorry.

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