I have been listening to pandora.com for a while and really enjoy it. The only thing is, they will play copy cat artists - the same song, sounds about the same, but not the real artist. Is there a way to disable this?
I have searched the FAQ’s and message boards for info on stuff like this and I haven’t found any.
I have a couple stations, one I wanted for fast upbeat songs that I can work to or exercise to but there’s no way to specify this. I tried picking seed songs that are upbeat and they will play other songs by the artist that are slow and never play the seed song. Heck, I didn’t even know these artists had slow songs! I picked a Shakira song (in English) and they decided I must want Spanish language songs, they were upbeat but not what I wanted and no matter how many I thumbs down they keep trying to play more.
Another station is more mellow and for the most part I get a lot of songs I like but they will often play these sleep inducing instrumentals and if I thumb down one they follow it with another and another and another. They will also play a lot of other similar songs in a row and don’t mix it up very much.
I think what you’re looking for isn’t very likely at all since the idea of pandora, as I understand it, is to find artists and songs similar to what you said you like.
No, the way they work is that it is a pretend radio station. It has to do with how they pay for the songs. If you could only listen to the songs you wanted it would be like a free jukebox. The record companies are afraid that you could use pandora for free instead of buying the music. Some artists songs may not be licensed, so these artists will not get played.
Yeah, there are ones that Pandora doesn’t have the rights to be able to play. It would be sweet if you could request anything you wanted, but then of course I doubt I would buy that much music really.
Yes, the way to eliminate “copy cats” or anything else you don’t like is to click the Thumbs Down icon when the song you don’t like comes on. Eventually it will learn what you want to hear. It’s not instantaneous, but it works.
By the by, I pretty much *always *hear my “seed song” within an hour of starting a new station.
I less than three Pandora; listen to it all the time. It works best when you’re really mindful about using the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons, particularly when you’ve just created a new station.
If you thumbs-down a song, you’ll never hear it again on that station. If you thumbs-down two songs by an artist, you’ll never hear that artist again. You can work around that second bit if you want by thumbing-up one of that artist’s songs, or adding the artist or one of their songs to the seed.
I just started a new station the other evening for rock instrumentals, seeded with “Jessica” by the Allman Brothers Band. I do have to thumbs-down a good number of ABB’s stuff with vocals, but never more than once. It’s neat to see how quickly Pandora catches on to what I want in a station.