Music at work

My office is quiet, too quiet. No one talks or stops by to chat and it drives me crazy. Yes, I work in a library, where it's supposed to be quiet, but being really lifeless is not good.

So to combat this, I have found a couple of online music sites which stream music. The first is Pandora where you can create your own radio station by choosing artists you like. Pandora uses something called the "music genome" to classify all kinds of music so that it can serve you similar songs for your radio station. You can give any song a thumbs up or down, giving you some control over your playlist. There are links to purchase the song or album as well.

I like hearing new music here and also seeing the development of my station. Somehow my Ventures station, which started out with instrumental surf music, has grown to encompass the Dead Milkmen and the Ramones -- and it's a good thing.

My new music find is Wolfgang's Vault. This site streams music recorded in the 60's and 70's at the Fillmore East and West in San Francisco. There is vintage Hendrix, Joplin and Grateful Dead here, as well as Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. For the backstory on this site, read this.

I hope my free music feast will continue, but if the bandwith police in IT crackdown, I guess I'll need to get an MP3 player.