Opening Pandora’s Box
April 23, 2009
About a year-and-a-half ago a coworker introduced me to Pandora. At that point, I hadn’t found a place online that I really connected with. Of course, I visited CNN and MSNBC for news all day and occasionally iTunes or PerezHilton, but that was it. Call it a personal preference, but Facebook and MySpace were never for me, and I begrudgingly LinkedIn for business reasons.
But here was a free site that allowed me to create my own radio stations to play genres of music that I selected … without any commercials. Anything I didn’t like got a thumbs down and was never played again. Frankly, it seemed too good to be true, but I have been listening to Pandora ever since. When I heard that the company was having trouble making money because users didn’t look at the site very often (making banner ads a tough sell), I found myself thinking about ways to help and have been sending suggestions to them from time to time.
I have gone on to buy a SqueezeBox that would let me listen to my Pandora stations at home, and I check the site daily to see when the BlackBerry application will be ready so that I will have it on my phone too. I have quite literally driven friends crazy talking about what a big fan I am.
I have always been a bit resistant to following the crowd – and in a true Gen-X/Nick Hornby sort of way, I haven’t wanted to be a part of what has been happening online. Social media just wasn’t for me. But the other day when I found myself Tweeting Pandora’s “Online Community Manager,” I knew resistance was futile. Thanks a lot, Pandora.
