Pandora Ads

Every day when I start my homework, the first thing that I do is put on music. There is only so many times you can listen to the same iTunes playlist, so I have to go to a different source for my musical entertainment. My favorite source for music is Pandora, also called the Human Genome Project. Pandora allows the listener to constantly stream music that relates to a particular song, artist, or genre that the listener has selected.

I have been a Pandora user for about four years now. When I first started to use the site, it was like heaven. I could listen to a bunch of music I liked, and discover a lot of music I had never heard of before, but the honeymoon period I had with Pandora ended shortly after I realized the business of Pandora. The site is supported partially due to revenue it collects from the ads that it promotes on its site. A large ad covers much of the main screen and audio ads run on the site about every six songs. Before, you could have Pandora running in the background of your party, and everyone thought you had really good taste in music, but now, the ads are a dead giveaway that you are as boring as the rest of the world who can’t generate a decent playlist of music. The advertisements work in a way that can trick someone who gets lost in the music. One minute you could be listening to Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 and the next minute you hear, “Hey, have you tried this scent of Axe yet?” Other commercials actually use music to trick you into thinking you are listening to a selected piece of music, when suddenly, someone is trying to sell you another useful product or 100 free business cards. The ads in Pandora really take away from the music listening experience, but then again, the creators aren’t really worried about you enjoying the music as much as them making money.