I don't know if it's just me, but Pandora is a pretty low bar for music recommendations. I paid for Pandora One for a few years, but pretty much stopped using i

I don't know if it's just me, but Pandora is a pretty low bar for music recommendations. I paid for Pandora One for a few years, but pretty much stopped using it after a few months because its playlists would be incredibly incongruous. My Radiohead station became overrun with, for example, Katy Perry despite my efforts to "thumbs down" songs that didn't fit the Radiohead sound that I wanted. Invariably, every time I've tried Pandora since, it plays one or two songs that match (the same ones every time, which gets really boring) before it meanders off into a forest constructed of oddities and WTF moments. iTunes' Genius recommendations / playlists, though, have been incredibly good for me. Relatively obscure / nuanced selections generate amazingly well-balanced playlists with good variety without straying too far from the sound I want to listen to. For example, RJD2's "Final Frontier" is followed by: * DJ Shadow - Keep Em Close * Blackalicious - Rhymes For The Deaf, Dumb, And Blind * Wax Tailor - I Don't Know Pandora, on the other hand, comes up with: * Diddy - We Gon' Make It * T.I - Doperman * Diverse - Wylin Out I know Pandora's selecting from a huge library and iTunes Genius is selecting from my library, but my library is incredibly diverse and is in no way narrow enough to improve Genius' results. I get great playlists for everything from Coconut Records to Mayer Hawthorne to The Black Keys to Johnny Cash to the Heartless Bastards. Maybe Pandora was good for it's time, but it simply hasn't improved enough over time. It's as if Netflix still used their original recommendation algorithm. tl;dr: Saying Echo Nest is better than Pandora is not a very strong statement.