Back in the day I used to go to the bars. The thing I liked most about the bars, even more than the adult beverages and the witty repartee, was being exposed to new music. When I heard music I liked, I would turn to someone, the bartender usually, and say "I'm digging this hip sound. Who's puttin it out?" or something similar, and the bartender would say, "It's the [Blah-blah's], aren't they wicked cool?" or something similar, and then I would go buy their CD at the record store. It was in this tres-analog fashion I built what the kids call "a CD collection."
But that was back in the day. Now that I no longer frequent the bars, I no longer hear new music; nor am I informed when an old favorite has a new release. A perusal of my CD collection would give one the impression the music industry ground to a halt around the time Pavement released Terror Twilight in the spring of '99; which was, you might correctly assume, when I stopped frequenting the bars.
The obvious solution? Go spend more time in bars. However this is not necessary...now that I've found Pandora. I can tell Pandora that the most current CD I own is Terror Twilight, and she doesn't mock me like the kids at the Virgin Megastore. She's all, "Then you were totally a Guided by Voices freak, and Robert Pollard has a new CD, and you will love it." And she plays it, and I do. And feel safe and warm and good, and strangely compelled to buy an iPod for the first time since they hit the market.
All the bars around here only play 80's music anyway, and I already own all that shit because I was a kid hanging out in bars and Pandora hadn't been invented yet.