In my experience, Pandora simply doesn’t tend to give me music that I like even when I put in an artist that I like.
This is probably because some human came up with the categories. Humans aren’t very good at that—machines are much better at figuring this sort of thing out. Of course, getting machines to read fiction would be difficult, but without that, you’re likely to end up with formulas that work fine if one is already a writer and not so much otherwise.
In my experience, Pandora simply doesn’t tend to give me music that I like even when I put in an artist that I like.
Yes, Pandora does give me music with qualities in common with the music I like. It’s just that those aren’t the qualities that make me really like the music. Instead, I just get ho-hum dopplegangers of bands that I like.
Never used Pandora, but it sounds suspicious that it has “world music” as a genre with ‘genes’. The definition is more or less “non-Western traditional music from everywhere in the world”. It sounds like “all of music” wouldn’t be much more diverse than “all non-Western music”, so why group by genre at all? Alternatively, if Western music contains most of the musical diversity in the world, that’s an interesting result I’d love to read about.
“World music” usually means “non-Western music marketed to Westerners”. You won’t get Indian or Arabian “Pop” genres labeled “World Music”. As a matter of fact, you’re unlikely to find them at all.
When I started, I just put in every artist that I like. After a few days of more downvoting than I’d like, Pandora got pretty good at predicting. It just needed more data points on what I liked and disliked in music.
I found that upvoting and downvoting on Pandora made the results insipid. It works better for me to just have a bunch of stations based on music I like, and then shuffle them.
I’ve used Pandora extensively since around its launch. I find it’s really good if I’m looking for a ‘feel’ - I tend to have music that’s for particular purposes, like “Dungeons and Dragons combat music”—and with a couple of appropriate seeds and a little grooming, such stations work out really well.
One thing that consistently annoys me about Pandora is the amount of fake constraints they put on the system. Like, “Kids’ music” doesn’t come up on ‘Adult’ stations, so TMBG’s kids’ albums don’t interact with their adult albums at all. And things like “artist” and “humorous lyrics” pretty much trump everything else, so if you seed a station with “Fake Bjork song” you have no chance of getting Bjork but probably will get other Liam Lynch songs and stuff like Tenacious D.
In my experience, Pandora simply doesn’t tend to give me music that I like even when I put in an artist that I like.
This is probably because some human came up with the categories. Humans aren’t very good at that—machines are much better at figuring this sort of thing out. Of course, getting machines to read fiction would be difficult, but without that, you’re likely to end up with formulas that work fine if one is already a writer and not so much otherwise.
Yes, Pandora does give me music with qualities in common with the music I like. It’s just that those aren’t the qualities that make me really like the music. Instead, I just get ho-hum dopplegangers of bands that I like.
Never used Pandora, but it sounds suspicious that it has “world music” as a genre with ‘genes’. The definition is more or less “non-Western traditional music from everywhere in the world”. It sounds like “all of music” wouldn’t be much more diverse than “all non-Western music”, so why group by genre at all? Alternatively, if Western music contains most of the musical diversity in the world, that’s an interesting result I’d love to read about.
“World music” usually means “non-Western music marketed to Westerners”. You won’t get Indian or Arabian “Pop” genres labeled “World Music”. As a matter of fact, you’re unlikely to find them at all.
When I started, I just put in every artist that I like. After a few days of more downvoting than I’d like, Pandora got pretty good at predicting. It just needed more data points on what I liked and disliked in music.
I found that upvoting and downvoting on Pandora made the results insipid. It works better for me to just have a bunch of stations based on music I like, and then shuffle them.
I’ve used Pandora extensively since around its launch. I find it’s really good if I’m looking for a ‘feel’ - I tend to have music that’s for particular purposes, like “Dungeons and Dragons combat music”—and with a couple of appropriate seeds and a little grooming, such stations work out really well.
One thing that consistently annoys me about Pandora is the amount of fake constraints they put on the system. Like, “Kids’ music” doesn’t come up on ‘Adult’ stations, so TMBG’s kids’ albums don’t interact with their adult albums at all. And things like “artist” and “humorous lyrics” pretty much trump everything else, so if you seed a station with “Fake Bjork song” you have no chance of getting Bjork but probably will get other Liam Lynch songs and stuff like Tenacious D.
As someone who doesn’t live in the USA and thus doesn’t have access to Pandora, I’m finding your experiences an interesting wealth.