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Pandora Is Said to Have Held Talks About Selling Itself
- cenal 11y agoIs there a venture backed company that hasn't had this kind of conversation? I don't see how you could raise money without having this kind of conversation.
- pgrote 11y agoIt would be a bummer if Pandora is sold and the service changed appreciably. One would hope you could somehow get your ratings out of the system.
- arsenerei 11y agoNot the best, but https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/12202/is-there-a-way-to-export-list-of-pandora-songs-that-i-have-upvoted-or-downvoted https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/12202/is-there-a.... Additionally, Pandora does have an API that allows you to pull your favorites. https://6xq.net/pandora-apidoc/json/ https://6xq.net/pandora-apidoc/json/
- livingparadox 11y agoI think it would be interesting to have google buy it. Pandora's strength seems to come from their massive dataset of song traits. Google could probably make good use of that data. They'd probably feed it into a neural net and see if they can teach a machine to detect those traits, if they haven't already.
- gtk40 11y agoI already prefer auto-playlists from Google Play Music to Pandora's. I think the acquisition of Songza probably helped.
- LandoCalrissian 11y agoI agree, Songza was a big win for them. I was really impressed at how quick they got their features moved into Google Music, not super typical for Google.
- bphogan 11y agoOne of my dreams is to actually see how all of that works. I'm not in it for the music - I just really am a music nerd and would love to know how all that stuff is stored, pulled together, and queried.
- livingparadox 11y agoFor Pandora, they use a vector distance algorithm (with some other nudges to keep it from being repetitive, I'm sure). They break down a song on a scale of 1-5 across hundreds of "genes" and then pick songs based on how similar or "close" they are in the multidimensional space.
- samstave 11y agoHeh, the fully automated driving experience will be wonderful when the robots are driving us around and then music streamedninto the car is all robotically recommended to us. now we just need fully automated robotic restaurants and we truly will be taken care of by technology.
- new_hackers 11y agoand fully robotic farmers and fully robotic hole diggers, and a robot to mush together our squishy parts occasionally
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- tenpoundhammer 11y agoIt would be great if Netflix bought pandora, I can see Netflix doing really great things with the underlying tech and expanding on the general idea and service of pandora. Also the pandora recommendation engine could be leveraged to provide improved Netflix recommendations.
- ma2rten 11y agoPandora's algorithm is specific to music and it requires musicians to hand label each song.
- tenpoundhammer 11y agoSure it's specific to music but the thought technology and ideology around it could be exported to other things. The hand labeling sucks though.
- edgyswingset 11y agoThat's because algorithms can't pick up the nuances of what distinguishes, say, Noise Rock and Noise Rock/Shoegaze. You need humans who understand these things.
- amk_ 11y agoBack in the day, Pandora showed you the attributes that they had tagged each song with (stuff like "down-tempo funky grooves", "offbeat emphasis", "prominent female vocalist"). I always wished there was some way to create a station based on an intersection of attributes, rather than a union, when you add multiple seeds to a station.
- pogue 11y agoYou can do this. In the song you like, click on a tag to create the station. Then under the station preferences you can add variety, such as an artist, genre or another tag.
- rubidium 11y agoI pay for Pandora b/c I get to listen to radio without ads and talk show hosts. I don't want to worry about what songs to play. Select a station and go. "Pandora to post $1.2 billion in revenue for the year, an increase of 27 percent from 2014, the company’s slowest annual growth ever." ... It's cases like this where I wish it wasn't a public company and instead was run by someone who wanted to keep making the best music streaming app/website in town.
- buckbova 11y agoI paid for pandora for a period. But now it wants to play the same songs all the time. Moved to spotify. I can listen to an available playlist or to every album from an artist one at a time or make my own playlist and store it for offline use. Seems more natural and wide open. I had (and still do in the vehicle) XM radio, which basically solves your use case. Radio with no adverts. Some stations do have hosts, but it's not a talk show.
- spike021 11y agoHonestly it has always wanted to play the same songs very often. I used to easily reach 40 hours of play per month on the free tier (back when 40 hours was the max). Give it enough time and you wind up just hearing the same music. Sometimes I'd start a station with a very different style/genre and it'd still happen where they'd both cross as well. Too much repetition.
- bobajeff 11y agoYeah, I think a lot of people are moving to Spotify. I myself never paid for either but have use both (using someone else's account on Spotify). Being able to play offline + any song/album + similar artist play mode makes Spotify hands down the better service. I think Pandora used to have something special with their Music Genome Project recommendation system but I don't think they really rely on it as much anymore as it now seems based off of the likes and other activity other online radio recommendation systems use. I wish some one would do a open data version of the Music Genome Project that you could hook up to a personal playlist.
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- nik736 11y agoCan't we just get Rdio back? Please. :-(
- KingMob 11y agoIt's a shame Rdio died, it's UI/UX was far superior to Spotify. Navigating Spotify is like have a razor blade poking out of your mouse.
- welly 11y agoHow are you struggling to navigate with Spotify? I think the Spotify usability is great. But I have been using it since it first came out and so any "quirks" I'm possibly just used to. Still, I find it easy to use. If you think Spotify is bad, have you tried Apple Music? Jesus, that is a stinking pile of shit. It's awful and exactly what stopped me from using it beyond two weeks into the trial. Google Play Music is somewhere between the two but I find absolutely no problem with Spotify's UI/UX. That said, I never used Rdio so don't have that to compare it with.
- zachwood 11y agoI'm a former Rdio user who's migrated to Spotify. It's clearly better in some ways but I struggle with trying to understand some of the decisions the team has made. Just off the top of my head... - The queue is fundamentally broken and useless. They really should rename it to "play stack... kinda". - Clicking on an album to play it puts you in a subtly different state than playing the first song in that album. I'll let you figure that one out. - The activity stream is one-way. there is no way to reply to a post. You are just shouting out into the darkness. - Gestures don't work on osx, you have to find and click the tiny back button to go back. - It's track/playlist based but playlists have a 10k song limit, so there is no way to keep a large collection of 'favorite' albums. - From a list view there is no way to tell if an item is a single or a full album without clicking into it's detail view. - No way to change your avatar. It's tied to whatever your facebook avatar is. - Playlists have no description or image - unless you are a music label partner. And dozens of features and niceties that Rdio had that you probably can't appreciate until you used them. There's a slack community (Rdio Lovers) with hundreds of people that can't find a service that is anywhere near as polished and complete as Rdio was.
- sucrose 11y agoOff-topic: http://ridetheclown.com/wp/saver2/ http://ridetheclown.com/wp/saver2/
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- kylehotchkiss 11y agoRight after buying Rdio? Grr.
- a_lifters_life 11y agoI hear ya, that pisses me off.
- tallerholler 11y agoyeah totally bogus!!! rdio > pandora in my opinion... horseradish!
- Drive137 11y agoya they kill of what was a VERY nice place to go for music. Better quality, better UI/UX even more so the spotify, (see others comments in this HN thread for some examples), Now I am back to being stuck with spotify since getting the same music over and over again is really bad. in both services. (I have not used Google Play Music enough to really comment on it) So sad we had to lose a great service to one that was going down hill and did not even use the great service to bolster itself.
- sytelus 11y agoI really hope they give some way to export out my ratings. Is it possible to do that right now?
- crudbug 11y agoIf Netflix buys Pandora, the resulting entity will be an Internet Media power house.
- robbiemitchell 11y agoSpotify, with help from The Echo Nest acquisition, replicated Pandora a while ago.
- archagon 11y agoIt would be so depressing if Pandora's incredible music trait database went down the acquisition drain. I would pay good money for a service that let me search for songs by sets of traits. ("Give me some songs in minor, with technically impressive solos, with haunting female vocals, without any drums.")
- visarga 11y agoPandora is said to be a very beautiful and dangerous woman. I am sorry to hear she is selling herself. There's still hope, though...