Not a pitting, per se, because I actually love Pandora and have discovered quite a few new bands by listening to it at work, but…
Why is it when you choose a newer band to build your “station” around, Pandora seems to choose bands that have a similar sound, but when you pick a band from the 70’s or 80’s, Pandora just plays a bunch of stuff from that decade that sounds nothing like the original band?!
Anybody else get this on Pandora?
Yeah, my Badfinger radio was playing Momma Cass’ Dream a Little Dream, the Raspberrys Go All The Way and some other very light stuff yesterday and I wondered the same thing.
If I put Beck radio on though I get tons of stuff I previously was completely unfamiliar with. In fact, it’s a great way to expose yourself to bands you wouldn’t hear on the conventional radio.
Not sure why it’s that way but I do see the same thing as you.
A lot of people view things like “'80s music” as a genre unto itself. When these people go on Pandora and use The Thompson Twins to create a channel, they’re probably more interested in building an “'80s music channel,” then a “bands who sound like The Thompson Twins” channel.
In other words, it probably works that way because that’s how most of the users want it to work.
I have experienced this phenomenon. The best way around it, IMHO, is not to “thumbs-down” the ones you don’t want, necessarily, because that tends to result in Pandora-hell, where your station consists of the same 12 songs ad infinitum. Rather, keep “thumbsing-up” the ones you do want, and eventually, it’ll catch on. I was able to “prune” a New Wave / New Romantic station this way.
I’ve been a big fan of Pandora for a long time. That said, I’ve recently discovered grooveshark.com and Pandora has lost a bit of it’s luster. IMO, Pandora is still better for discovering new-to-you music, but other than that, GrooveShark has it beat on all counts. It lets you pick any song you want, fast-forward within a song, and skip songs to your heart’s content. It also has a lot of B-sides and such. If you haven’t checked it out, you won’t regret it.
Considering that Pandora just gave me: Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, and Kansas as the last three songs on my Police mix, I may have to give GrooveShark a try.
Kansas!
I mostly build channels around stuff of that vintage (except for my Beethoven channel) but I can mostly see more or less why they picked the stuff they do. I’ve had success with the thumbs down method also. A problem with too many thumbs up is that these songs repeat probably more than I want them to.
BTW, I just started listening again after a long gap, and the number of on-air ads seem to have gone way down. Anyone else notice this?
I haven’t noticed that they are even all that good with the modern stuff. I thumbs upped one Shakira song in English and they decided I must want every Spanish language song ever made. I wanted to get all upbeat songs but somehow they manage to find every slow mopey song by artists whose fast songs I had added and these are artists that predominantly have fast upbeat songs.