I haven’t bought music in years, my interest in seeing live music has waned as well, but I remain obsessed with Pandora, a site where you can create your own radio station and hone it to your precise tastes over time by rating the music you hear.
On Pandora, I have a few stations that I curate for myself. Over the last year, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my jazz station. I’ve always enjoyed jazz but knew next to nothing about it. However, after several months listening to my jazz station on Pandora, I’ve become a jazz fan who is at least semi-literate in the genre, able to pick out the name of an artist when I overhear some jazz at a restaurant, for example.
Noticing my newfound jazz knowledge, I hoped that a Pandora station might be able to help me with my other musical blind spot (or would that be deaf spot?): classical music. However, I was dismayed to find that Pandora didn’t have classical music… That is, they didn’t until today. So check back with me in a few months. By then my new classical station (named Soooo Classic, of course) will have made me something of an aficionado.
Bonus Link: Alex Ross in The New Yorker: “The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music.”
