Finding wedding songs over recent years has become much easier with digital music. One of the more popular Internet radio stations of today is Pandora. As of July 2016, Pandora had an estimated 250 million users and more than 78 million monthly active users. But how can you utilize Pandora for finding wedding songs?

Pandora has more than 1 million songs from over 100,000 artists. The songs and artists are hand-picked. This is one of the reasons we like Pandora for finding wedding songs. We need some sort of filtering to the most popular songs. We live by the theory, “The worst song played at a wedding is the one that no one knows”.

First – Create an Account.

You have the option of creating a free Pandora account and be forced to see and listen to advertisements. You can upgrade to a monthly plan for $4.99. What are the other benefits of a paid subscription? Well, more song skips and fewer timeouts to listen to ads. If you are a heavy user, the subscription is well worth the out of pocket expense.

ad free pandora

Ok, if you have not already done so – go signup. NOW! The music exploration is actually FUN!

Next – Using Pandora.

Let’s pretend you have signed in to your Pandora account. You will first want to add an artist, favorite music style or favorite music era into the “+ Create Station” box. You can find it in the upper left of the page and looks like this:

create station

Once you have your station playing, you have several options. If the phone rings and you want to pause the station, you can. Then, restart it when the phone call is complete.

Not fond of a song, you can skip it. However, you are only allowed six skips per hour (unless you have the paid version).

The song skip is much different than the thumbs up and thumbs down options. The thumbs option will change your station’s algorithm and the way in which your songs are selected. We recommend not to utilize the thumbs down altogether when finding wedding songs. The theory behind thumbs down is Pandora will lessen the pool of song options to your playlist. We do not want to limit any songs while we are in exploration mode. Thumbs up on the other hands works the same way. Pandora will find similar songs. You can use this option but would use sparingly to only your favorites – like top 10 songs.

Finding the perfect wedding song Pandora stations

The best advice we can give you in adding stations is to create stations by song titles. This will give the most targeted song suggestions to the type of music you want played at your wedding.

Other station options…

Do you like music from a particular era? Just type in the era into the “Create Station box” to add it to your profile. Examples: 70s, 80s, and 90s. If you want to explore songs from a particular year, like 2015 and 2016, type the year into the “Create Station box”.

Do you like a specific music style? Type in the music style into the “Create Station box”. Examples: Country, Rock, Indie, and R&B.

You should now have playlists in your profile by era and music styles. This will help Pandora work their algorithm to more related songs for you.

Here is a full-size screen shot of music playing and the stations selected next to the song information.

song playing stations

Wedding Song Stations

Here is a list of some of our favorite stations for finding wedding songs that you may not have heard before exploration.

Pop Love Songs Radio
Today’s Adult Hits Radio
Today’s Hits Radio
Country Love Songs Radio
Today’s Christian Hits Radio
90s, 2000s, Today’s Hits Ratio
Wedding Songs Radio

Finding similar artists

Do you like a particular artist and their style of music but want to find similar artists and songs? A great example to this is our love of The Piano Guys. We added a single station for The Piano Guys and Pandora played similar artists. It was a great way to create a custom happy hour playlist for songs of like music style.

If you keep hearing the same songs, you can also add variety to the station. See below screen shot.

add variety

When researching wedding songs on Pandora, you have many options to find songs based on your music preferences. If you already have a well established Pandora account, you may consider creating a new account under a wedding specific email. This will prevent Pandora from leaving off artists based upon previous thumbs up/down and song skips. It is a great way to start from scratch.

About
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Matthew Campbell

Founder at My Wedding Songs

Matt loves listening to any music style he can understand the words. He lives in the wedding capital of the world, Las Vegas, with his wife Sharon. Matt's other likes include craft beer, baseball, and traveling.