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points by hardtke 2 days ago | 0 comments

I would bet that you can train Pandora's algo to respect this preference by thumbing down every vocal techno track. The music genome annotators will have a boolean for vocals in the analysis. You'd likely start using recommendation strategies that use the annotations more than normal. Pandora is still the best for lean back listening.

[–] ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago

Pandora was always the best at figuring out what I wanted to hear; long before AI was a thing, and it's still better.

However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.

[–] delecti 2 days ago

No matter my goal, I found that my Pandora stations always converged on the same endpoint. I always ended up with Ellie Goulding and Dubstep, despite not really liking either of those. It rather killed my interest in the service.

The one exception was an experiment where I gave every single song a thumbs up. It converged on comedy rock (Weird Al, Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, etc).

[–] driverdan 2 days ago

Way back when I used Pandora I found similar behavior if I gave songs thumbs down. It would converge on a small selection of a few artists and their music. It was really good at some genres if I didn't thumbs up or down many songs.

I've seen the same kind of thing in other services that weight recent choices as a part of their graph based recommendations like Spotify and YouTube. They can get stuck in a feedback loop where the pool of recommendations shrinks to the point where it recommends the same stuff over and over.

[–] thaumasiotes 2 days ago

That isn't a feature of Pandora.

I have quite a few channels:

1. Comedy rock, seeded by "Code Monkey". (Mainly Jonathan Coulton and Weird Al Yankovic, but other people sneak in there. The biggest hit, in personal terms, was a song by Matthew Ebel.)

2. Secondary comedy rock, seeded by "Weird Al Yankovic"; this channel is mostly dead. It tried to converge with the main comedy rock channel for obvious reasons.

3. Country (sad), seeded by "She Used To Say That To Me". The main thing on this channel that I personally see as a genre outlier is Mark McGuinn's "Busy Signal", but going to youtube I see that that song is tagged "#countrymusic".

4. Country (happy), seeded by "Emily Harper".

Those two channels also constantly attempt to converge with each other. But they mostly don't try to converge with the comedy rock channel.

5. "Clancy Brothers".

This has blossomed into a more general Irish folk and sea shanty channel.

6. "Steeleye Span".

This one plays Steeleye Span and some other English folk and folk rock music. It constantly tries to play Irish music, though the Clancy Brothers channel does not try to play English folk.

7. "Alan Menken". This one is good at staying separate. It plays showtunes. (And sometimes branches out a little; Annette Funicello's "Pineapple Princess" is on there.)

8. A channel seeded by "Kiss Me", by Sixpence None The Richer. I like the way this song sounds. I was never happy with anything that played on this channel and it's been abandoned.

Within the past several years I have gotten the feeling that Pandora would rather I just have one channel that plays "everything"; there have been attempts at crossing the deeper channel boundaries.

I have never ended up with Ellie Goulding or Dubstep.

[–] malfist 2 days ago

Maybe you found the secret sauce to Pandora by everyone I know that used Pandora extensively had OPs experience. Myself and my partner both stopped using it after years of paid subscriptions because of that problem

[–] thaumasiotes 2 days ago

> However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.

I have a bunch of different Pandora channels with different themes.

Pandora's skip limit is per-channel. If you run out of skips on one channel, and give up on it and start playing another channel, you get the full complement of skips back. You can go for quite a while if you have several channels.

In a development that is probably not related, but nevertheless feels like it is, Pandora tries hard to get you to collapse your channels, playing songs on one of them that don't fit at all but that you've thumbed up on another channel.

(Another obvious pattern is that if you haven't signed in to Pandora in a while, all of your channels will heavily feature songs that you've already thumbed up. They start playing new potential "discoveries" only after working through a "welcome back" backlog.)

[–] ahartmetz 2 days ago

Spotify fucking sucks - it seems to try to herd everyone into one of a few genres. For me, last.fm was the best. Currently I'm reasonably happy with Soundcloud.

[–] johnnyanmac 2 days ago

yes. You are (or at least, were. c. late 2000's) Pandora's customer. They want to maximize engagement either to serve ads or to justify a subscription.

You are Spotify's product. They get money making record labels happy. User preference is secondary to this goal.

[–] devin 2 days ago

We used to have a running joke in the office that all pandora stations eventually converge on Maroon 5. You could pick a death metal station and eventually it would somehow work its way to a paid 2 play popular band track. It was still pretty good though.

[–] fcarraldo 2 days ago

This but ‘Home’ by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

[–] switchbak 2 days ago

I've never felt so seen. That _fucking_ song.

[–] socalgal2 2 days ago

Pandora had the problem that I dislike a song and then it's like "how about mix #17 of the same song?", "how about mix #7 of the same song", "how about mix #3" of the same song?"

[–] taurath 2 days ago

The algorithm was the product, the licensing model was its failure. Proof you can get goodwill via an algorithm if you actually make it for the user rather than treating them like fodder for your ad network. Maybe someday in my lifetime we can actually achieve the dreams our platforms promised but rugpulled to make the worst people on the planet billionaires