On some of my Pandora stations, I"ll let a song go by without giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down. I usually do this because the song is kinda blah, but I might like other songs by the artist. If you give enough thumbs down to an artist, you won’t hear any more songs by that artist.
So, does just letting the blah song play without a rating achieve my desired effect? I don’t give it thumbs up because I don’t want Pandora to use it as a song to base future suggestions from. I don’t give it thumbs down because I try to use that to make sure when Pandora stays too far from my tastes I can get that song booted and it will usually play a very safe song next.
Also, does giving a thumbs down to a song on one station prevent the song from being played on another one of my stations? My early am station is quite mellow, so I’ll thumbs down some songs that I’d like after I’m awake and had my coffee.
This doesn’t directly address the OP (don’t really know the answer to the question), but have you checked out jango.com? When you add an artist to your play-list on Jango, they give you a list of that artist’s work, and you can tell them you ‘Love’, ‘Like’, or ‘Hate’ that song.
In many ways (though not in all ways) I like Jango better than Pandora.
As long as this is still floating out there, I’m going to hop on board with another question: is there a way of saying “Dudes–this crappy cover version of the song sucks! Play the real version!” to pandora?
I keep ending up with all the muzak versions of Beatles songs by some “Sir Paul must have been stoned and feeling VERY mellow when he recorded them” album–his version of “Helter-Skelter” is nearly in slow-motion.
What annoys me about Pandora is I can’t say “I want only uptempo songs” or “No rap”. I was trying to create a station that were only uptempo dance type songs to get me moving. I picked a Justin Timberlake song as a song seed, I got a bunch of rap songs. I picked a fast Shakira song, and then I got a bunch of latino songs and every slow Shakira song she ever made but never an uptempo one. If I thumbs down those songs I keep getting more of the same. I gave up on that station because it just wouldn’t get it. On my main station they keep playing this one artist that I don’t like, I thumbs down the song and she’s back again with a different song a little while later. There’s another artist I like but I’m tired of so I choose, “don’t play this for another month”, then they play another song by her. :smack:
If you read the Pandora faq, it’s actually explained there pretty clearly.
According to the faq,
Yes, not marking the song does have the effect you are after. The artist is not removed from the candidate list, but the song’s attributes do not contribute to your next selections either.
If you thumbs-up a song, its attributes are added to your list of “attributes liked”, and since Pandora re-gets a new list of songs every 4th song, you will start hearig more songs like it quite soon.
If you repeatedly thumbs-down songs by the same artist, that artist is removed from your list of match candidates.
There’s also an option to shelve a song for a month. If you come across a song that is blah, but probably similar to what you like, you can just block it for a month and I don’t think it affects your station preferences at all. Hopefully, after a month your station will have refined it away or else you’ll have enough thumbs up/down that you can give it a thumbs down without having it impact your station much.
Of course, I don’t have enough musical knowledge to understand Pandora’s categorizations at all. I seem to really dig major key tonality, though, whatever that means.