I know how it is supposed to work. I pick around five artists/types of music, it throws me songs from those and others supposedly of the same genre, and I vote thumbs up or down. With basic Pandora you have only so many thumbs down/skips for a while, meaning you have to listen to what they throw at you. Well, my initial picks were They Might Be Giants, Tom Lehrer, Jonathan Coulson, Bob Rivers and Alan Sherman. I give a thumbs up when they pop up and a thumbs down when Monty Python, Irish Rovers and others that I want to put on another channel get thrown at me. Fine and/or dandy until I run out of my share of thumbs…and all Pandora gives me is top ten hits from Hotel California, Dire Straits, The Eagles, The Rolling Stones etc. I have been going at this all day and I want to know-When does Pandora get the hang of what I want to listen to??. What am I doing wrong?
…and it just threw Chicago, Boston and CCR(Proud Mary, of course) at me in a row.
Ok. There’s this box. Do Not open it…
I kid.
Is this a paid subscription or the trial or free version?
Free version. It is what I can currently afford.
I’ll bet they limit your downloads.
At least she had hope.
Not doing this for the downloads.
Oh. Well, I don’t know then.
If I remember correctly (I used to have a Pandora subscription), the paid version gives you a lot more upvotes/downvotes per hour, which would help it learn faster, I imagine.
Also, my understanding is that a lot of the variables it looks at for trying to give you matches, based on your selected channel/artist, are based on musical style things like key, rhythm, and vocal style, which may not be relevant ways to create the type of station you seem to be trying to make (a “humor music” station).
Supposedly, Pandora breaks down music into various components and tries to find new songs by matching those to songs you already enjoy. So less “People who like The Rolling Stones also generally like The Who” and more “This person likes low syncopation and diatonic harmonies and emotional lyrics so let’s find more songs that feature those.”
I have to believe that there’s some element of popularity to it. After all, if lots of people like The Beatles then it makes sense to retain subscribers by first playing The Beatles before getting into sorta Beatles-esque tunes based on music theory. So my guess is that the music you’re getting broadly fits the components Pandora was getting from your choices and you haven’t voted enough to for it to fine tune its recommendations better.
Yes, exactly. I have the paid version, which doesn’t limit your thumbs up/down per hour. I’ve been using it for years so am pretty familiar. I think the “music theory” aspect may be more hype than reality. IMO it’s more like "you like this (genre) band from (this decade)…well, check this out! And overall I’ve been pretty happy with it.
But the algorithm is completely unable to deal with a “humor” station or otherwise classify music according to the content or tone of the lyrics.
I might buy that if it weren’t for the fact that every damn song I get after the thumbs run out for a time can be heard 20 times a day on a 70’s and/or 80’s station-songs played so damn often that people who hate rock can hum along. If Pandora is looking for similar components it sure as hell ain’t digging too deep to find them.
Also, every one of these “music algorithm” sites I have ever tried concludes that I must love CCR. They must just hit some mathematical sweet spot.
Do you have the option of putting it in “deep cuts” or “discovery” mode? These steer it a bit away from the moldy oldies.
As I recall, you can click/tap on a song and get the “Why are you playing this?” bit where it says what the musical components are that it thinks you’re into. You could see if there’s any similarities there. I suspect that there’s some surface level stuff like beat and, for lack of knowing more about what you like, just grabs the most popular stuff that broadly fits those metrics.
As I recall, Pandora came out of the Music Genome Project which well predated streaming music. So it wasn’t entirely like “Let’s come up with a gimmick for our streaming service” but a sincere attempt to turn the MGP into a “better” way to find new music. Now, how successful it is and how much it relies on other basic things like popularity I couldn’t tell you
My suspicion is that the songs which it initially served up to you, based on the artists you chose, and the ones you gave thumbs-up to so far, were diverse enough in style (according to the dimensions in their algorithm) that it just doesn’t have a good handle on what you’re looking for, and so, it’s defaulting to the most popular stuff overall.
Yes, you might want to try making a station with fewer artists. It may be just confused about what all these folks have in common and is just figuratively shrugging and saying “Well, humans usually like The Eagles”.
I don’t remember ever seeing the “why are you playing this?” button, though it sounds like a great idea. Either it was before my time or you’re thinking of a different site.
I definitely remember it from when I used Pandora regularly, but that was years ago, and they may not still offer it?
I just looked. It’s there in the drop down menu called “Why This Song?”
Regina Spektor’s “Us”…
Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features romantic lyrics, melodic string accompaniment, mellow rock instrumentation, major key tonality and extensive vamping.