I do think that’s it. From a musical style standpoint, and not the lyrics, Tom Lehrer’s music has very little in common with, say, They Might Be Giants. It just feels to me that the particular kind of channel that @Czarcasm wants to make is one that Pandora’s algorithm can’t do well.
Whenever I try to make a channel with my favorite singing rabbis, it recognizes it as “religious” music…and recommends gospel artists. 
I’ve given up on that.
You can make radio stations based on songs rather than artists, right? That might get you more targeted and less generic results.
Yeh. I tried to make a P.D.Q. Bach station, and it was a complete no go.
Even if you can, the algorithm is going to be trying to match against the style of the music, not necessarily the fact that the song has humorous lyrics.
Might just be that Pandora is a poor match for this use case (as has been suggested) and maybe try a free sub on a different service. Could be that Spotify (to pick an obvious alternative) does a better job of “People who like TMBG, Alan Sherman and Tom Leher also like…”
I haven’t used Pandora in many years, but I do know that they are owned by Sirrius XM and that doesn’t give me a good feeling about the algorithm. They run SXM out of Pandora in Europe because they do not have satellite coverage over there. I find SXM to just be OK, but very limited and repetitive.
I used Pandora many years ago. The paid version was pretty good, the free version not so much. When I gave up the paid version I never even considered using the free version.
I agree that there’s very little musically in common between TMBG and, well, most other artists, so that could be throwing off the algorithm.
You could pay for a month to get unlimited thumbs up/down and maybe that will help Pandora figure it out. You should still have the station available after your month is up, I imagine.
As others have said, I believe Pandora looks at the components of the music you’re playing and maybe it can’t recognize “funny” as one of the components. And, when you told it not to play Monty Python, it probably gave up on that genre anyway.
I remember listening to some Pandora station and some oddball song came up and I thought, what? Then, realized that the style of music was actually quite close to whatever artists I had started with. Kind of cool.
Spotify uses lots of playlists put together by people, so you might have more luck there.
Yes, with Spotify you can skip the “make up a playlist based on my tastes” and just play some of their curated lists. That’s what my Millennial kids do.
I was in a coffee shop. I was drawing, so I was in there for hours (yes, Mom, I bought breakfast), and I went up to the counter: “WHO picked this music? It’s great.”
It was just a playlist called
Best Coffee Shop Playlist Ever
(https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5fEcPm4Zb69HYOiSKNnqyx)
.
I don’t have Spotify or Pandora, but does any service have a “Never play this artist!” button?
Spotify allows you to block an artist from their profile. Don’t know about Pandora but I’d be surprised if you can’t.
AFIAK Pandora doesn’t let you thumb down an artist, but if you thumb down every song of theirs it gives you, it gets the message after a few songs.
The push towards popular stuff cannot be underestimated in such algorithms. It is basically the best method of generating recommendations for most people.
Find a highly popular group that is anywhere remotely in the same category, pick a hit by that group, push that song.
This is not all that different in how things like oldies stations had playlists of the same 40 songs (if that). Go with the most popular of the most popular and you please the most listeners.
But some people (and I think the SDMB has a lot of them) don’t follow the crowd and the OP ensues.
This is why things like Netflix trying to get me to help them create a recommendation list drives me crazy. They are not going to come anywhere close to getting it right, they just clog the screen with crap, etc.
I assume you meant Jonathan Coulton; but that makes me wonder whether you’ll mess Pandora up by misspelling names.
Sorry. The only misspelling was in that post.
I gave up on Pandora several years ago because the algorithm was so bad, while Spotify put together meaningful playlists for me. Not sure it has changed since I gave it up, but I got tired of Pink Floyd showing up everywhere. I mean, I like PF, but when I want to listen to Ramones-like music, PF has no right showing up! 
I listen to the free version when I work. I find that even if I create a brand new station (say, Snoop Dogg), it plays songs that I’ve thumbed up on other stations. For example, I’ve given thumbs up to a lot of Tom Petty songs, so it sometimes tries to sneak a Tom Petty song into my Snoop Dogg station.
Maybe I at one point thumbs (or is it thumbed up?) up a Pink Floyd song and therefore thought it a good idea drop a little Money into my thrash metal station. Guess what, Pandora? It wasn’t.
I have a friend that swears the only way to use Pandora is never thumbs up/down any song. Maybe he is onto something.
I like Pandora in theory, and I haven’t used it in probably 10 years, but it would tend to give me the same songs over and over again even when I would create new channels with different types of music. I think at least part of it was the limited song database (at the time it had 1m song compared to spotify’s 40m or so). The web says they have 30-40m songs now on pandora, but are those all catalogued by the music genome project or has it just become a generic streaming site?
Spotify has done a pretty decent job of helping me discover new music. It’s not as sophisticated as Pandora’s method, but it has several ways of finding stuff (discover weekly / auto filled playlists is basically a “people who liked [what you just liked] also liked this…” type of feature. There are also spotify-curated and user-curated playlists, as well as dynamically generated genre playlists that change every few days.
One thing I appreciate is that it doesn’t have a bias towards steering me towards popular music at all. I don’t know if any popular music has ever hit my discover weekly playlist in the 5 or 6 years I’ve been a subscriber.
I used to use Pandora a lot for writing music, back before Amazon Music was a thing. I had the paid subscription, and one of my channels was Industrial (Assemblage 23, Covenant, VNV Nation, etc). It always amused me that it would play that kind of music for a while (and I found some new favorite artists form it) but invariably it would always wander off into gothy Renfair-type music. I didn’t complain because I liked that and actually found some artists I liked there too, but I never understood why. Gothy, yes. Medieval Renfair music? Not so much.