Send the Pandora staff an e-mail. A friend of mine works there, and I’ve mentioned a few semi- to very obscure bands I wouldn’t mind seeing on the site, and he said to just let him know when that happens. They’ll do whatever they can to get a requested artist on the site.
To me, half the fun is seeing which tangent it’ll dash me off on. If you use the “I like it/Don’t like it” function, sometimes that helps keep things a little closer to the vest.
I’m getting good results by starting with “The Entertainer” by Billy Joel. Jackson Browne, David Bowie, Elton John, Springsteen, The Who, Loudon Wainwright III, etc. So far I’ve only given one or two tracks a thumbs down because it tried to stray off into Blues.
Okay, Billy Joel —> Frank Zappa is kinda weird.
I like the site but have noticed a couple of things that make me wonder why …
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Many of the bands are very, very obscure … it’s almost as if they are trying to get you to try something different rather than just match music. Maybe they are.
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The same few songs by a popular artist get played over and over again. On my Warren Zevon station they have played only about half a dozen different songs of his in the last 10-15 times I’ve listened to it.
I suspect this has to do with the size of their library and how they get music for it. IOW, I doubt they have access to/a license for the entire WZ catalogue, while more obscure bands are going to be more interested in using this as a marketing aid.
Incidentally, a friend suggested that the drift may be due to pandora matching on the most recent song played. Hence, the initial song might have six qualities identified. The next might match five of those, the next four, and so on. Just a thought. Trying to peek inside pandora’s head is a minor obsession of mine; I’m always fearful that I’ll accidentally bias it against music I’d otherwise like just because they happened to play some particular band’s worst song.
I’ve had this same fear. If you nix any two songs by a given artist, it will never play that artist again for you. However, if you ever approve any one song by a given artists, it will not remove it from the pool, even if you nix eleven other songs by them.
I decided to try this out. It’s interesting, enough to get me to register anyway, but a bit too random for me to pay yet.
I started with Mea Culpa by Enigma, mainly because it had just played on my iPod and I thought it was just different enough to give Pandora something to work with. Pandora did give me a “this is taking longer than we expected” message on startup but it finally kicked in.
First up was Almost Full Moon, also by Enigma. OK, obvious enough.
Next was Dust and a Shadow from Shriekback. Interesting, I could see the similarities and it was one I didn’t remember hearing before. I make a note to look it up the next time I’m on iTunes. Point for Pandora.
The next song was Calling You by Aqua. Some sort of light techno-pop. Never heard of them and don’t care if I never do again. Still, I could see how Pandora got to them.
Next came Enya’s The Celts. A bit of a surprise and a somewhat jarring transistion but, OK, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
After that I got Heirlorm by Bjork]. Ummm… Huh? I don’t see it but I’ve never been a big Bjork fan so maybe I’m just biased.
But then came the big surprise. The Power of Love by Air Supply! W… T… F…?
So, tell me. Is this thing always this random? Do you have to keep tweaking it to keep it in line? (Not that random is neccessarily bad, but… Air Supply?)
Apparently so. I’m still getting good results with my Billy Joel station but I still have to nix a few thing to keep it straying too far. It keeps wanting to play Blues every so often.
You got Billy Joel and you consider that to be a good result? God help you.
Just tried it based on the recommendation here, and so far I’m pretty impressed by how much music I’ve never heard of is in their library and supposedly sounds like what I put in their engine. Seriously, it is an interesting toy, and maybe I’ll discover some new artisits.
No, I started with Billy Joel. Scroll upthread a bit. 
Thanks for the heads up. That does help to assuage my concerns a bit.
And hey, sometimes the genre hopping is a good thing. I’d never have realized that I appearantly rather like jam bands if it hadn’t decided to give me one on some sort of (IIRC) melodic dark/goth metal station…
Well, yeah. You can do three things to Pandora- name a song/artist, say “I don’t like this song,” and say “I do like this song.”
If you neglect two of the available three steps, don’t expect good results.
There’s a third one: “I’m tired of this song. Don’t play it for a month.”
Wow, great recommendation. I just registered and started a channel a half hour ago, and I’m loving it!
Honestly, I’m not sure what I was expecting. Air Supply just threw me. I guess I was underestimating how important it is to “fine tune” what it picks via the thumbs up and downs.
For amusement I just let it keep going for a while. It played about three songs by some group called Baxter that I had never heard of, drifted off for a while into pure electronica, played a couple of ambient/space music tracks, came back through Fatboy Slim and wound up somewhere in hip-hop before I finally stopped it. I wish there was some way to display a graph or something showing how it is making its connections. (Yeah, I know it has the “why are we playing this song” button but that doesn’t always help.)
I started a second station with Portishead and this one seems to be behaving itself much more, though it does try to drift off into blues a bit more than I was expecting.
I think it works better if you give it more than one artist per station along with remembering to use the thumbs.