(If you make a new account with another email address and start using that before you run out of hours on the first account, you can get another 40 hours, FYI.)
That’s my problem with Pandora. I like it well enough, but I don’t use it as often as I would like to, since I very rarely seem to hear new music anymore. I have something like 25-30 stations ranging from rap to 60s R&B to indie to post-punk to classical, and even if I select “Quick Mix,” I swear it seems like I hear the same damned songs over and over again. Frankly, I prefer to stream Internet radio over Pandora, because it has a better chance of introducing me to bands I’ve never heard before, or deeper cuts off artists I like.
I think your last sentence is my general feeling, too.
I love Pandora, but for most of my musical tastes, Pandora until fairly recently didn’t even had a selection, and now that it does, it can be fairly limited.
I have a very eclectic radio station, and I do like that Pandora has introduced me to music. Yet, once introduced to that, or once I add variety to the station, it seems I get the same cuts repeated over and over, even though I know (and the freaking system should know) I have other songs.
I think something about it is the rating system… either you like it or not. Yahoo Music (up until about a year and a half ago) had a decent, similar system… only this time, you got to rate the music (don’t play, and one stars to five stars)… I KNEW that the songs that played constantly, sometimes more than once daily, where the once rated five stars… The ones with three stars? maybe a couple times a week…
I started with Launchcast somewhere around 1999 or 2000. It was free then, with unlimited skips. At that time you could rate using a percentage. Then they started limiting skips. Somewhere along the way Yahoo Music bought them out and it sucked for a while. Then Yahoo straightened it back out. It was never as good as it was in the old days, but it was still something I was willing to pay about $30 per year for. I started paying because I had reached my max listening time a couple of months in a row. I could still listen, but couldn’t skip. As with Pandora, a subscription bought unlimited time and no ads. It also bought unlimited skips. Like KarlGrenze said, it was repetitive, but I chose what was repeated.
The problem for me with Pandora is that whatever qualities they use to match up music are vastly different from the qualities I’m interested in. It also plays Seether and Puddle of Mudd on my Gary Allan station. I don’t understand that. Last night, I had it play two songs in a row by the same artist, only to change the station and have it do the same thing with another artist. If I wanted to hear that, I’d just listen to a cd.
I reached max listening time on Pandora once. I didn’t pay. Even though I sometimes listen a lot, it has never been something I value enough to pay for. I was spoiled with the original Launchcast. If there is something out there as good as Launchcast, or even the Yahoo Music it became, I’d be willing to pay again. But never for Pandora as it currently exists.
Before my work place blocked Pandora, I was hitting my 40 free hours about 1 week into the month. I debated on paying 36 for the year, but I decided it wasn't worth it and started just paying the .99 for the rest of the month.
If you pay the $36 you get a desktop application you can use instead of using your browser. Also, it supposedly streams in higher quality, but I doubt you’d be able to tell much difference. You do get unlimited skips per day (as opposed to the normal 12 per day max), but you still have a max of 6 skips per hour.
The no ads feature is probably the best reason to pay, but even then $36 is a bit much. I usually go fairly long stretches of time between ads, and they are only 30 seconds long after all.
Oh also, you know how if you don’t click something after like 15 minutes they pause the music? They extend it to 5 hours. So that’s pretty cool if you like to turn it on and go do something else.
All good features, but that’s still a bit much to pay for something that’s almost as good for basically pocket change.
I’d save a buck or 36 and just go listen to CBC Radio 3 for the rest of the month to peep and eaves D some new music.
I think that the music genome project has a few bugs in it, that’s for sure. I have a few stations that I can honestly say that Pandora has no idea what to play. Those stations get the most random songs popping up, which is just Pandora speak for “I will give you something I know until you give me a thumbs up and I can pigeon hole you on this one”.
Ad Block Plus is free.
I got fed up with Pandora’s antics a little while back… Moved on to Grooveshark and haven’t looked back. Content is user generated (uploaded), like YouTube, but the number of songs is already staggering.
The ‘radio’ function mimics Pandora’s, continually playing songs similar to your seed(s) and 
(thumbed up) songs.
It’s not U.S.-only, to boot.
Grooveshark is cool, but there’s not an app for that, and I primarly use the streaming services on my phone. I could just use Safari to access it, but still, I want an app first.
Grooveshark does look cool, but you have to pay for the desktop app and no ads (like Pandora), so not really a big reason to change. The “suggestions” also seem much more random.
Or you could pay $20 for Station Ripper and have it record MP3s from CBC Radio 3 and a dozens of other internet radio stations for you like one of the digital radio services offers as a feature too. (CBC Radio 3 is one of the stations I record!)
Still not sure what I’ll do but thanks for mentioning all the alternative sites, guys. I’ll try to check those out and see if I like any of them as much as Pandora.