This is my Pandora profile… blank, but I think you can listen? And if you do, I warn that you can get Pachelbel’s Canon followed by Hector Lavoe followed by U2. 
My last.fm profile is named CaveMike oddly enough. I have the living room MP3 player set up to scrobble too – see if you can tell what’s mine and what’s my wife’s.
Hey, Madison Park (that’s weird, though, that it didn’t list it under the thing that says how musically compatible you are)! I’m guessing your wife. 
ETA: Yes, KarlGrenze, the link works.
My Last.fm profile, friend me if you like.
I think that is actually mine from one of the stations I listen too. I have one of their mp3s from an old download of WinAmp too. My wife listens to her stuff on repeat, so she drives up Norah Jones (which I also like a lot) and Pink.
Then there was the time that last.fm glitched and played only Smashing Pumpkins on random. I left it on for a few hours and got to enjoy a band that I don’t own much of.
I was listening to the SDMB station yesterday and got to hear a lot of music I normally would not pick on my own; which is really my favorite thing about last.fm. Some jazz, some humor, a cowboy song or two – great stuff.
One thing that annoys me a little about Pandora is that the iPhone app does not have the button to put a song “on the shelf” for a month, for no apparent reason. All you can do is skip it temporarily.
Used to like Pandora, but can’t access it now due to jerkass licensing restrictions on non-USA-type people.
I do like last.fm, though. My Profile. I hope all the last.fm users join the SDMB Group.
Cool. Another Tom Waits / Frank Black lover. Are you a freak like me and prefer his solo stuff to The Pixies? It sometimes seems like I’m the only one.
I love Pandora. I used to have have a “Number One Station” where in I tried to add all my favorite artists on one station, but that got too eclectic. Now I have several stations based on different artists. I love how it doesn’t necessarily go by genre. I discovered I like music with “extensive vamping,” “subtle use of vocal harmonies,” and “mix of electric and acoustic instrumentation.”
I recently started an “Xmas Station” for the Holidays.
“Extensive vamping” shows up on a lot of mine too, along with “four-on-the-floor beats”. Not really sure what that’s supposed to mean…
So, people with Christmas stations, do they work consistently, or do you get a lot of non-Christmas songs with it?
The Gathering station.
I set up this neo-prog station on Pandora for newer progressive rock music (my latest infatuation). There’s not a lot of dance music here, but fans of old school prog like King Crimson, Yes or Peter Gabriel’s version of Genesis might find something they like.
A few months ago, I set up this other station which I named “jamband-prog” by seeding with a range of bands like the Allman Brothers, Little Feat, Santana and next gen jambands like moe. and Widespread Panic. Originally I had some prog bands, but when I started the neo-prog station I removed those from this station. I’ve probably spent more time writing this post than I have listening to it.
I’ve been reading the LastFM site and it sounds like scrobbling (is that how you’d say it?) might be interesting, but they suggest I upgrade my software (from Win2000) and I ain’t gonna.
Okay, I’ve been using Pandora and I don’t think I’m giving it too narrow a place to start, but the repetition of songs is starting to drive me mad.
I was trying to listen to bluegrass, but it just kept repeating songs. So, I decided to switch over to something else, and it’s still doing a ton of repetition. I set it to look for music like “The Thorns.”
What am I doing wrong?
Use the “Don’t play this song for a month” button, which will keep an overplayed song from being played on any station of yours, but will not effect song selection apart from that.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
I am hitting that button sometimes, but I’m not necessarily standing right by the computer, so it would be nice to find a way to stop the repetition without having to nurse it, y’know?
hmm, I don’t have that problem. It does repeat songs that I that thumbed up, but that’s a good thing.
How many seed artists did you start the station with? I find that the more seed artists you have the better job it does. My radiohead station is only, meh. My Indy Rock station which was seeded with 4 different artists and has 50 or so thumbed up songs and another 30 or so thumbed down songs is much better.
If you skip a song it shouldn’t play it again that day (I think). If you skip it (I think) 3 times it doesn’t play it again for a month. So if you don’t want to thumb down a song you can just skip it and it will tell pandora that they are playing it too much for your taste.
The above may be too obvious, but I don’t have this particular problem, so I am not totally sure.
ETA: after your last response: you will need to spend a few hours with it in the beginning so it can learn. Listen to it while you are at the computer anyway for a while. Once you put in a bit of time it works fairly well. But you have to give it enough feedback that it has something to build on. Even then, if you hear something you really like or hate, take a second to go over an thumb up or down that song.
Yeah, I don’t really know, either (except part of the problem for me is that I’ve hit thumbs-up on different remixes of a song, with the result being that it wants to play the song four times more often).
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
For the bluegrass station, I started with three artists. Maybe four. Is there a way to see that now that my memory isn’t to be trusted?
For this other, I think I just picked The Thorns and I’m getting the same sort of thing.
So, I guess I don’t know how to pick artists that will expand it.
I was getting the feeling that when I thumbs upped or downed a song, I was just narrowing my playlist that much more and causing more and more repetition.
That is not correct, AFAIK. You must hit the “Don’t play for a month” button for it not to play it for a month.
And I’m not sure I agree that having more seeds is necessarily better. I do have my main station with 14 song seeds (which I think work better than artist seeds) from 8 different artists, but I also have Smile.dk Radio, Chewing Gum Radio, and (:o) Barbie Girl Radio, which are from a single artist and song, respectively, and I think they are also very good. The really annoying part is that you can never get a particular song you want to play to actually play (I started Chewing Gum Radio mainly for getting that song to play so that I could move it over to my main station, and it hasn’t played once yet).
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris