DIVA APPROVED: Party Music Playlists
Create your party music playlists with Pandora!
Create your party music playlists with Pandora
Don’t worry if you’re not a technophile, Pandora is designed to help even the least computer-savvy amongst us create a personalized radio station quickly. If you’re new to the website, just follow these easy steps:
- In your web browser, log on to www.Pandora.com, where you’ll see the program load and arrive at a control panel. It’s a good idea to register so that you can save your music stations.
- Click on Create a New Station.
- Type in the name of your favorite artist, song or composer to “seed” the station.
- Click Create.
- Now, go and enjoy!
With a little practice you can refine your station so it’s a good idea to experiment with Pandora well before the day of your party. To get the most out of your Pandora experience try these tips:
- Spend some time listening to your newly created station and rate some of the music. While songs are playing you will see an icon that displays the name of the song, the artist, and the album cover. Mouse over the bottom of the icon and you’ll find thumbs-up and thumbs-down symbols that you can use to teach Pandora more about the music you want to hear. Pandora recommends rating about one out of every five songs.
- To retrieve a very specific sound: Try adding more than one song to the station. Pandora is controlled by a sophisticated mathematical algorithm created by the Music Genome Project that organizes songs according to about 400 musical attributes. Adding five songs to a new station will, basically, fine-tune the math behind the music, giving you more variety while maintaining the specific sounds you want.
- For more variety: Add a lot of songs and some artist’s names to your station. The addition of the artist’s names will cause the Music Genome to select music from the artist’s entire repertoire, which means more musical attributes in the mix.
A few technical details:
- For both PC and Macintosh computers, Pandora recommends a machine with at least a 1Ghz processor and at least 256M of RAM and make sure your sound card drivers are updated.
- You’ll need a high speed Internet connection (DSL or Cable). Dial-up won’t do it when you’re using Pandora.
- Make sure you have the latest version of the Flash plug-in.
This diva tip brought to you by Tim Westergren, Founder of Pandora.com
