7 ms·

After I discovered Pandora back in 2010, I haven't looked back. While it lacks ability to play a song on demand, where it truly outshines are its recommendation

by rm2889 10y ago

After I discovered Pandora back in 2010, I haven't looked back. While it lacks ability to play a song on demand, where it truly outshines are its recommendations. Maybe its the nature of their recommendation algorithm - they call it the music genome project; a content based recommendation ending using very finely refined categorizations as opposed to the methodologies most other recommenders follow - a mix of collaborative filtering and content-based, but not as detailed on creating categories that a song can fall into. I know I'm sounding like such a fanboy but I discovered some of my favorite bands and artists after hearing them first through Pandora's recommendations. I've often heard songs I liked at random places, shazammed them, and created a channel on Pandora, which has led to some really good artists that I would've never heard through other media. So for music discovery, Pandora is where its at. I really hope this company sticks around.

nixy 10y ago
I haven't used Pandora in a long time, but I have to say that everything you mention can be applied to my experience of Spotify's discovery/radio features as well. Plus it handles playing songs on-demand.
- josteink 10y ago
  Same can be said for Google Play All Access. And you can fill the gaps in their catalog by uploading your own music. Tldr: I really don't see the case for pandora in 2017.
  - gtaylor 10y ago
    I like and use Play Music, but find their recommendation engine to be less great. The channels work a bit differently, too.
    - cschmittiey 10y ago
      Oddly enough I love GP's recommendation set so much more than Pandora's. It's so much better attuned to what I like and don't and what I like to explore. It's very good at distinguishing what I like and what I don't, and I'm pretty picky about what I listen to.
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    The most important thing for Google Play Music after the "upload your own stuff": It does a great job caching songs ahead while you're on Wifi, so you can minimize data usage while out and about. Plus, with the caching it also works offline perfectly well. I feel a bit sorry for all the other services, but on a technical level Google Play Music has outplayed them all entirely.
- nhangen 10y ago
  Pandora did it first, and not just by a few years.
- codyb 10y ago
  I can't seem to get spotify to recommend me anything besides rap music. I use the checkboxes to indicate I like classical, the Dead, Phish, Dylan, Cash, and more but I have never once had anything besides rap music show up on my discover weekly. It's a bit frustrating. There's recommendations at the bottom of individual playlists now so I can look there but still a pain that I can't get a nice mix in my discover weekly.
  - ameister14 10y ago
    What do you actually listen to? Do you listen to a lot of rap? If so, that's likely to cause your discovery issue.
wfunction 10y ago
I was amazed by Pandora's recommendations too. That is, until it gave me the error "We're sorry, but we couldn't find any more music to play on your station right now. Try switching stations."
- viewer5 10y ago
  I never saw that message before; what kind of station was it?
  - wfunction 10y ago
    It was my main (only?) station. I had some 30 songs on it, pretty good sampling of my tastes (pretty typical pop/rock/etc. music... Daughtry, Train, etc.). It gave me great recommendations which for a while completely blew my mind over and over (when my friend told me about the human classification part, I was like, I KNEW there was no way a machine could've done this so well), but it eventually outright failed and just gave me that message. So I gave up on it too. I guess that's better than Spotify which just plays my own songs over and over again at my "radio" stations...
    - novia 10y ago
      I got that message before. I found that if you switched stations and then switched right back the problem would magically go away.
wobbleblob 10y ago
Not long after I discovered Pandora, they banned me for living in the wrong country. No, they didn't want my dollars. Off with you scum in non-English speaking countries, your money probably smells funny. It's ok, there's Spotify now, which doesn't arbitrarily ban users for living in the wrong place. Spotify has become a much better, much more flexible service. Even if Pandora were to lift its ban on foreigners, there is no longer a market for their service here. Sorry Pandora, you had the momentum, but threw it away.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Spotify doesn't let you use them if you live in the wrong country either, you just happen to live in a right country for them.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    Not that it's much better, but Spotify will let you live in the wrong country as long as you can pay from the right country (like Apple, they depend on the billing address for debit/credit card). But that's all ignoring the actually source of these restrictions. They don't come from the services themselves. They come from the outdated music industry structure that hasn't kept up with the internet-enabled globalized world.
- StevePerkins 10y ago
  #1: That has to do with terms of licensing deals imposed by the music labels, not an arbitrary decision by Pandora that they don't want to accept your money. #2: It is the case with ALL music and video streaming providers. Apparently you lucked out with Spotify, but that could be the opposite for someone else. Stupid, yes... but the bad guys here are the record labels rather than the streaming services.
  - nobleach 10y ago
    It's 2017 and music labels/companies still want to say, "you can't hear this song because we haven't settled distribution rights... and can't make any money off of it... so... poo on you"
samsolomon 10y ago
Most of the time I don't want to pick a song. I want to listen to a certain genre and just have music play. Pandora was perfect for me. I paid for Pandora ONE for 5 years. This year I cancelled and moved to Spotify. For $2/month it was a great product and a great deal. But the product didn't change over a 5 year period. I found stations got stuck into the same set of songs and would stop adding new ones. I wonder win the last time the Music Genome Project was updated? More infuriating, their buggy Adobe Air desktop app was never fixed or updated. Three years ago the price moved to $3/mo. Two years ago it moved to $4/mo. This past year they got rid of any grandfathered discounts and charged $5/mo. I was sick of paying more for the same product and jumped ship. I do miss my radio stations, but Spotify's prebuilt playlists are pretty good replacement.
- redwood 10y ago
  Stuck on the same set of songs is really the Killer
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- aswanson 10y ago
  I liked spotify but requiring a fb account to listen is pretty lame. Don't know if they've modified that requirement.
  - notheguyouthink 10y ago
    They must have, i'm a Spotify sub and i've never used FB with Spotify. At least, that i remember. I rarely (read: maybe once a year) login to FB so i despise any FB-only login services.
  - bendykstra 10y ago
    I have had Spotify for about a year and have never had to connect Facebook.
  - magic_beans 10y ago
    How opposed would you be to creating a shell fb account with zero personal info and a fake name, in order to log in to products? I realize you shouldn't have to take this extra step, but so many wonderful products DO require an fb login...
thearn4 10y ago
This is still pretty true for me today. I use Pandora for discovery, and Spotify for maintaining fixed playlists. Google play music actually works great for both of these functions, but the app is extremely unstable on my phone (Moto X running 5.1), so it isn't an option for me.
notheguyouthink 10y ago
It's sad how much room there is to disrupt music with what i consider basic features in data storage. Eg, why are we still using playlists? I want to be able to sort/listen to my music by tags, ranging from "cool" to "energetic" to "happy". Ie, a string tag, a tempo tag, and an emotion tag. I want to be able to filter queries to an arbitrary number of tags and genres. I want to be able to filter by who it was produced by, who played in it, per album or per song. Most of the features i want don't require any complex content recognition algorithm. And yet, like it's 1990, most of the music apps i use (spotify, google music) lack what i consider to be basic features. Why did Gmail "pave the way" with tagging instead of folders, and yet i'm still stuck using Playlists in Google Music? Why does Spotify support a nice rich community for playlists, but seemingly won't let the community add meaningful data to songs, albums, etc and then let me query my song collection from that? I know, i'm sure there are plenty of mp3 players and etc that do this just fine - but i use Spotify, and i want the features in there. I want a streaming collection of on demand music. I like the variety. I'd kill for my above features with a Spotify-like package.
- riprowan 10y ago
  The answer is that "cool" and "happy" tags won't find the music you want. Vivaldi's "Spring" and Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy" and "C'Mon Get Happy" by the Partridge Family are all "happy." As is "Sailing" by Christopher Cross and Charlie Pride's "Kiss an Angel Good Morning." Turns out that what most people really want when they say "I want to be able to sort/listen to my music by tags" is something that feels like a curated playlist, where the songs naturally work together one-after-another without being jarring, usually within some music category if not within a narrow genre.
  - notheguyouthink 10y ago
    > The answer is that "cool" and "happy" tags won't find the music you want. Vivaldi's "Spring" and Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy" and "C'Mon Get Happy" by the Partridge Family are all "happy." As is "Sailing" by Christopher Cross and Charlie Pride's "Kiss an Angel Good Morning." Are those all the same artist? The same album? The same genre? My point in the above questions is that of course a single field won't perfectly fit to all songs in existence, but "fit" is subjective. If i want "up tempo" music, and i don't request anything else, then give me all up tempo music. Rage rock, rap, symphony, all of it. I can refine the filter if i want. This allows me to query "play me all up tempo music from Dave Matthews Band". "Play me all happy music from Dave Matthews Band's album Live at the Rocks", and etc. > Turns out that what most people really want when they say "I want to be able to sort/listen to my music by tags" is something that feels like a curated playlist, where the songs naturally work together one-after-another without being jarring, usually within some music category if not within a narrow genre. Clearly that's not what i want, as i am extremely dissatisfied with Playlists. Expecting all music to somehow be grouped into non-flexible folders (which is all playlists are) seems silly to me. Do you think i shouldn't be able to Search Google/Internet for custom terms? Why can i not search music for custom tags, but i can search for genres? Having tags doesn't mean Playlists can't exist, but it can allow me to refine my UX to exactly what i want. I'm sick of curated Playlists, and i'm tired of trying to remember all song names in existence to build my own. I want better data to build collections of songs.
acjohnson55 10y ago
Music Genome Project is unique in that the annotations are done by humans. So it's very difficult to outperform. I hear Spotify, with the help of The Echo Nest's machine learning expertise, is close though.
brogrammernot 10y ago
It is a great free service but I don't pay $5-10/month to not be able to listen to a specific song I want to hear. Pandora's model of not having that feature will always outweigh their music matching algorithm.
segmondy 10y ago
It was fun discovering music with pandora, but I got sick of hearing the same thing over and over again. I started paying for Spotify. I discover music with spotify too by just searching for people's playlists too. Sometimes I just wanna listen to the same track in a loop for hours. Sometimes I don't, I love that choice.
disposition2 10y ago
It wasn't high on the user count, compared to Spotify (and probably Pandora) but Rdio was __the__ music streaming service for any music nerd. Their recommendations was better than Pandora (probably why Pandora bought them out); UI/UX was better than Spotify (ability to browse on web while listening on phone was a feature I miss greatly); the breadth of information (on the site / app) available about a song / album / artist / recording beats anything I ever encountered outside of a now shuttered 'pirate' library. The last one is something that no other service I have encountered even considers (maybe Spotify has some recording info?). Also their API was a joy to use and very helpful support staff. Sorry for the rant, especially when comparing your observation to something that no longer exists. Edit: but one can hope that Pandora will put all of that wonderfulness together one day in to their own product.

by rm2889 10y ago

nixy 10y ago

I haven't used Pandora in a long time, but I have to say that everything you mention can be applied to my experience of Spotify's discovery/radio features as well. Plus it handles playing songs on-demand.

josteink 10y ago
Same can be said for Google Play All Access. And you can fill the gaps in their catalog by uploading your own music. Tldr: I really don't see the case for pandora in 2017.
- gtaylor 10y ago
  I like and use Play Music, but find their recommendation engine to be less great. The channels work a bit differently, too.
  - cschmittiey 10y ago
    Oddly enough I love GP's recommendation set so much more than Pandora's. It's so much better attuned to what I like and don't and what I like to explore. It's very good at distinguishing what I like and what I don't, and I'm pretty picky about what I listen to.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  The most important thing for Google Play Music after the "upload your own stuff": It does a great job caching songs ahead while you're on Wifi, so you can minimize data usage while out and about. Plus, with the caching it also works offline perfectly well. I feel a bit sorry for all the other services, but on a technical level Google Play Music has outplayed them all entirely.
nhangen 10y ago
Pandora did it first, and not just by a few years.
codyb 10y ago
I can't seem to get spotify to recommend me anything besides rap music. I use the checkboxes to indicate I like classical, the Dead, Phish, Dylan, Cash, and more but I have never once had anything besides rap music show up on my discover weekly. It's a bit frustrating. There's recommendations at the bottom of individual playlists now so I can look there but still a pain that I can't get a nice mix in my discover weekly.
- ameister14 10y ago
  What do you actually listen to? Do you listen to a lot of rap? If so, that's likely to cause your discovery issue.

wfunction 10y ago

I was amazed by Pandora's recommendations too. That is, until it gave me the error "We're sorry, but we couldn't find any more music to play on your station right now. Try switching stations."

viewer5 10y ago
I never saw that message before; what kind of station was it?
- wfunction 10y ago
  It was my main (only?) station. I had some 30 songs on it, pretty good sampling of my tastes (pretty typical pop/rock/etc. music... Daughtry, Train, etc.). It gave me great recommendations which for a while completely blew my mind over and over (when my friend told me about the human classification part, I was like, I KNEW there was no way a machine could've done this so well), but it eventually outright failed and just gave me that message. So I gave up on it too. I guess that's better than Spotify which just plays my own songs over and over again at my "radio" stations...
  - novia 10y ago
    I got that message before. I found that if you switched stations and then switched right back the problem would magically go away.

wobbleblob 10y ago

Not long after I discovered Pandora, they banned me for living in the wrong country. No, they didn't want my dollars. Off with you scum in non-English speaking countries, your money probably smells funny. It's ok, there's Spotify now, which doesn't arbitrarily ban users for living in the wrong place. Spotify has become a much better, much more flexible service. Even if Pandora were to lift its ban on foreigners, there is no longer a market for their service here. Sorry Pandora, you had the momentum, but threw it away.

icebraining 10y ago
Spotify doesn't let you use them if you live in the wrong country either, you just happen to live in a right country for them.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Not that it's much better, but Spotify will let you live in the wrong country as long as you can pay from the right country (like Apple, they depend on the billing address for debit/credit card). But that's all ignoring the actually source of these restrictions. They don't come from the services themselves. They come from the outdated music industry structure that hasn't kept up with the internet-enabled globalized world.
StevePerkins 10y ago
#1: That has to do with terms of licensing deals imposed by the music labels, not an arbitrary decision by Pandora that they don't want to accept your money. #2: It is the case with ALL music and video streaming providers. Apparently you lucked out with Spotify, but that could be the opposite for someone else. Stupid, yes... but the bad guys here are the record labels rather than the streaming services.
- nobleach 10y ago
  It's 2017 and music labels/companies still want to say, "you can't hear this song because we haven't settled distribution rights... and can't make any money off of it... so... poo on you"

samsolomon 10y ago

Most of the time I don't want to pick a song. I want to listen to a certain genre and just have music play. Pandora was perfect for me. I paid for Pandora ONE for 5 years. This year I cancelled and moved to Spotify. For $2/month it was a great product and a great deal. But the product didn't change over a 5 year period. I found stations got stuck into the same set of songs and would stop adding new ones. I wonder win the last time the Music Genome Project was updated? More infuriating, their buggy Adobe Air desktop app was never fixed or updated. Three years ago the price moved to $3/mo. Two years ago it moved to $4/mo. This past year they got rid of any grandfathered discounts and charged $5/mo. I was sick of paying more for the same product and jumped ship. I do miss my radio stations, but Spotify's prebuilt playlists are pretty good replacement.

redwood 10y ago
Stuck on the same set of songs is really the Killer
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aswanson 10y ago
I liked spotify but requiring a fb account to listen is pretty lame. Don't know if they've modified that requirement.
- notheguyouthink 10y ago
  They must have, i'm a Spotify sub and i've never used FB with Spotify. At least, that i remember. I rarely (read: maybe once a year) login to FB so i despise any FB-only login services.
- bendykstra 10y ago
  I have had Spotify for about a year and have never had to connect Facebook.
- magic_beans 10y ago
  How opposed would you be to creating a shell fb account with zero personal info and a fake name, in order to log in to products? I realize you shouldn't have to take this extra step, but so many wonderful products DO require an fb login...

thearn4 10y ago

This is still pretty true for me today. I use Pandora for discovery, and Spotify for maintaining fixed playlists. Google play music actually works great for both of these functions, but the app is extremely unstable on my phone (Moto X running 5.1), so it isn't an option for me.

notheguyouthink 10y ago

It's sad how much room there is to disrupt music with what i consider basic features in data storage. Eg, why are we still using playlists? I want to be able to sort/listen to my music by tags, ranging from "cool" to "energetic" to "happy". Ie, a string tag, a tempo tag, and an emotion tag. I want to be able to filter queries to an arbitrary number of tags and genres. I want to be able to filter by who it was produced by, who played in it, per album or per song. Most of the features i want don't require any complex content recognition algorithm. And yet, like it's 1990, most of the music apps i use (spotify, google music) lack what i consider to be basic features. Why did Gmail "pave the way" with tagging instead of folders, and yet i'm still stuck using Playlists in Google Music? Why does Spotify support a nice rich community for playlists, but seemingly won't let the community add meaningful data to songs, albums, etc and then let me query my song collection from that? I know, i'm sure there are plenty of mp3 players and etc that do this just fine - but i use Spotify, and i want the features in there. I want a streaming collection of on demand music. I like the variety. I'd kill for my above features with a Spotify-like package.

riprowan 10y ago
The answer is that "cool" and "happy" tags won't find the music you want. Vivaldi's "Spring" and Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy" and "C'Mon Get Happy" by the Partridge Family are all "happy." As is "Sailing" by Christopher Cross and Charlie Pride's "Kiss an Angel Good Morning." Turns out that what most people really want when they say "I want to be able to sort/listen to my music by tags" is something that feels like a curated playlist, where the songs naturally work together one-after-another without being jarring, usually within some music category if not within a narrow genre.
- notheguyouthink 10y ago
  > The answer is that "cool" and "happy" tags won't find the music you want. Vivaldi's "Spring" and Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy" and "C'Mon Get Happy" by the Partridge Family are all "happy." As is "Sailing" by Christopher Cross and Charlie Pride's "Kiss an Angel Good Morning." Are those all the same artist? The same album? The same genre? My point in the above questions is that of course a single field won't perfectly fit to all songs in existence, but "fit" is subjective. If i want "up tempo" music, and i don't request anything else, then give me all up tempo music. Rage rock, rap, symphony, all of it. I can refine the filter if i want. This allows me to query "play me all up tempo music from Dave Matthews Band". "Play me all happy music from Dave Matthews Band's album Live at the Rocks", and etc. > Turns out that what most people really want when they say "I want to be able to sort/listen to my music by tags" is something that feels like a curated playlist, where the songs naturally work together one-after-another without being jarring, usually within some music category if not within a narrow genre. Clearly that's not what i want, as i am extremely dissatisfied with Playlists. Expecting all music to somehow be grouped into non-flexible folders (which is all playlists are) seems silly to me. Do you think i shouldn't be able to Search Google/Internet for custom terms? Why can i not search music for custom tags, but i can search for genres? Having tags doesn't mean Playlists can't exist, but it can allow me to refine my UX to exactly what i want. I'm sick of curated Playlists, and i'm tired of trying to remember all song names in existence to build my own. I want better data to build collections of songs.

acjohnson55 10y ago

Music Genome Project is unique in that the annotations are done by humans. So it's very difficult to outperform. I hear Spotify, with the help of The Echo Nest's machine learning expertise, is close though.

brogrammernot 10y ago

It is a great free service but I don't pay $5-10/month to not be able to listen to a specific song I want to hear. Pandora's model of not having that feature will always outweigh their music matching algorithm.

segmondy 10y ago

It was fun discovering music with pandora, but I got sick of hearing the same thing over and over again. I started paying for Spotify. I discover music with spotify too by just searching for people's playlists too. Sometimes I just wanna listen to the same track in a loop for hours. Sometimes I don't, I love that choice.

disposition2 10y ago

It wasn't high on the user count, compared to Spotify (and probably Pandora) but Rdio was __the__ music streaming service for any music nerd. Their recommendations was better than Pandora (probably why Pandora bought them out); UI/UX was better than Spotify (ability to browse on web while listening on phone was a feature I miss greatly); the breadth of information (on the site / app) available about a song / album / artist / recording beats anything I ever encountered outside of a now shuttered 'pirate' library. The last one is something that no other service I have encountered even considers (maybe Spotify has some recording info?). Also their API was a joy to use and very helpful support staff. Sorry for the rant, especially when comparing your observation to something that no longer exists. Edit: but one can hope that Pandora will put all of that wonderfulness together one day in to their own product.