A Personal Blog
Screwing with Pandora
I started checking out Pandora early last week. Basically, Pandora is a cheap rip-off of Launchcast. It apparently uses some complicated algorithm to find the base types of songs you like – transcending musical genres.
Sometimes it’s genius, other times it’s thick-headed useless. I really shouldnt’ say it’s a rip on Launchcast. It’s quite cool.
Basically, you go to Pandora.com, put in an artist you like, and then it breaks that artist down to its base musical characteristics (type of rhythm, melody, type of music, syncopation, politicalness of music). It then finds similar music, across genres. For the first 20 minutes or so, it was working great. I picked Evanescence as the music I liked and it found Creed, Staind, Kelly Clarkson, Nickelback, etc, all of which is music I liked. But it was all a bit poppy, so I added an “artist I like” right into the mix: Eminem.
Ever since, 90% of the music it tosses my way is crappy hip-hop or R&B. I like, maybe, 8 such artists, so I’m constantly fighting Pandora’s recommendations.
So, I’ve given up. Launchcast’s way of actually rating artists may be more manual, but I actually get music I like after spending 20 minutes rating music. With Pandora, it either works great or it sucks. For the last half hour I’ve been “I hate this”‘ing hardcore hate rap, and I’ve now given up on Pandora.
About the author
| Print article | This entry was posted by Jeremy Wright on September 12, 2005 at 12:43 pm, and is filed under General. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
Comments are closed.
about 6 years ago
It only has mainstream artists. I entered a few of music I really like, and it couldn’t find any.
about 6 years ago
I’m hooked on Pandora. If you’re having probs with the station you created, just start a new one. I think you can have up to 100.
Also: If they don’t have what you want, send them an email message. They’ve asked that users send them suggestions not just on new features but on songs they should add to the music genome project. A friend of mine dropped them an email and got a message back from the CTO himself. Cool.
about 6 years ago
I’ve been a LaunchCast member since back before Yahoo owned them, so I’m a little biased. I have so many artists, songs, and albums rated that there is no way that a new service could ever know as much about me in the next 6 months or more. I have considered starting over from zero with pandora, but this post has reaffirmed my fears that starting over isn’t a good idea and, even if it was, how long would it be before I would have enough ratings in Pandora to make a real comparison to the 10,000+ ratings I have in Launch?
about 6 years ago
Glad that you’re giving Pandora a listen, sad to hear that it’s giving you inconsistent results. I certainly agree that it’s really lame that after you add a favorite song or artist to a station there’s no way to remove that feedback (let’s say you wanted to pull Eminem back out). How could we have thought that would be OK? It seems obvious now, but… well anyway you’ll be able to do that in a future version.
As far as station quality goes we’re working on that too. Our goal is to create great listening experiences from the smallest possible amount of input. Users seem on the whole to say that we “nail it” a fair bit of the time, but you’re certainly not alone in the experience of putting something in and getting back music that disappoints. That’s really not OK with us and we’re working hard to improve the system each week. We have lots of levers we can move that effect playlists and we’re working on making them better every day.
Anyway, we’re just a bunch of music lovers and programmers trying to create a great way to find and listen to music. I really love stumbling upon this kind of critique. It really does help. If you have other ideas about ways we could improve — or things you just think suck about what we’re doing, don’t hesitate to drop me an email at tconrad-at-gmail-dot-com.
Tom
CTO @ Pandora
PS: Hey Dennis — we really do have lots of music from folks who aren’t mainstream (I’m talking tens-of-thousands-of-cds piled floor to ceiling from every label imaginable). BUT there is just bound to be great stuff that we’ve somehow missed. Let us know! Drop an email to suggest-music-at-pandora-dot-com and we’ll get right on getting it into the Genome.