Are you sick of the songs on your iPod? Do you want to expand your musical horizons but don’t know where to start? Or, are you a stressed out high school kid like me who can’t focus on the social essay for more than 10 minutes at a time when you know that it’s due tomorrow morning?
Then I very strongly suggest that you check out 8tracks. 8tracks is a “handcrafted internet radio” website, which is really just a fancy way of saying that the website is composed of a bunch of different playlists put together by everyday music lovers. The playlists are organized into various moods and descriptors, including calm, folk, de-stresser, indie, happy, random, oldies, optimistic, rap and lovely.
And like I said earlier, if you need help focusing on the tasks at hand, I especially recommend taking a listen through the playlists under the “study” tab. And don’t scoff when I say this, but pay special attention to the ones that feature classical music. Seriously. I’m speaking from personal experience – I used to listen to mellow music while I studied in order to avoid background noise and disturbances, but in the end I always had to turn my music off because I kept on getting distracted by presence of the words. However, since I switched to listening to classical tunes a few weeks ago, my focus has improved noticeably and I can stay focused for longer periods of time. To further support this contention, scientific studies have actually proven that classical music helps improve productivity by stimulating the brain (the more complicated the melody lines, the better). So, go give it a try! Really, it’s wonderful. Oh, and there’s also a free iPod app that you can use provided you have internet access.
