Ok, I’m gonna go on a bit of a rant here. I want to create a simple app/widget that I can put in the sidebar of this blog so I can share my song of the day with anyone who might be interested (mostly so I just have a musical history of my life - a mlog if you will)

Why is this so difficult?

I dont understand last.fm at all. Half of the songs I want to listen to it only allows me to “preview” but only if I’m logged in. If I log out, I can listen to any song I want as many times as I want, but if I am logged in it limits what I can do. What the crap is that? Their FAQ’s say I can listen to most any full legnth song up to 3 times. So I can just log out and then listen as many times as I want?

Pandora allows me to customize my stations to an unbelievable degree of quality and accuracy. But it doesn’t allow me to really share that at all. Pandora give me a widget!

I just want to share music with people. Isn’t music supposed be shared? Take down your walls already music industry!

I live in a nice apartment building.  It isn’t the nicest one you can live in, but the rent isn’t cheap and they try to present a very high class image.  But they only do just enough to keep me from complaining. When they come to fix the something in my apartment, they do about 90%. The gym is always a mess. It is just good enough to not lose people.

But it isn’t excellent.

My New Years Resolution it to never once say to myself “good enough.” Good enough is exactly the oposite of what it should be, great. Clearly I am not a revolutionary here (if you haven’t read the book you should), but thats my resolution. To be great. Not really good, or almost. But great, all the time in everything I do.

I’m starting tomorrow. Every day I’m going to add a “song of the day” and at least a few short words about my thoughts. I have so many, but I never seem to get them down here, and I’d like to use this blog to look back at ideas and to have a conversation about them. Clearly the latter is not happening.

I love Pandora. It has added some amazing new features and I’ve discovered some old ones as well. I haven’t written anything in a while, and something I saw on Pandora just got me motivated. For those of you who don’t know Pandora, here’s the Wikipedia: “Pandora is an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service created by the Music Genome Project. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on the individual song choices — approval or disapproval — which Pandora takes into account for future selections.”

I use it all the time, when I have a long bought of work to accomplish I get a station going and I take full advantage of the thumbs up, thumbs down. Just now I noticed that when you click the thumbs up button, not only does it remember this and adjust the playlist accordingly, but it leaves a giant thumbs up in the background of the current song tile! So silly, but I loved it and it made me think about the devil in the details pitch I always try to give myself.

Pandora does it, they have all the details and they are loved by their users - over 40,000 new listeners everyday. It is a shame that the music industry is pushing them towards closing their doors soon.. (I can’t imagine that actually happens, its such a great service). I know alot of people are fans of last.fm, but I’ve never been to the site. No reason why not, just fell in love with pandora and stuck.

The devil is in the details and so is the the beauty. Keep goin Pandora, I’m pulling for you!

You can view my profile on pandora here