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In my personal experience I gave up on Pandora. It was regularly suggesting me music that wasn't at all similar to the song I started on. In fact it was consist

In my personal experience I gave up on Pandora. It was regularly suggesting me music that wasn't at all similar to the song I started on. In fact it was consistently worse at finding me similar music than just plain Spotify radio (or playlist enhancer) and/or YouTube Music radio. Contrast Chosic (which is free) - its recommendations are configurable and usually hit the mark much better: https://www.chosic.com/playlist-generator/ https://www.chosic.com/playlist-generator/

Juliate 3y ago
Or maybe the similarities were just not in the perspective you expected? (two songs in widly distant genres/production styles can still be very similar on rythm, tonality, chords, tension, progression, structure, etc.)
- wavemode 3y ago
  It was actually the other way around. It would play me songs technically within the same broad genre (Hip Hop, RnB, Pop) but wildly different sound. It felt less like a music genome project and more like this typical nonsense streaming platforms do, "people who listen to song A, also tend to listen to song B".
Slow_Hand 3y ago
Haha, same. I used to work in a music equipment rental warehouse that was staffed by musicians and all day we would be curating and training our favorite Pandora stations. If a bad song came on the person closest to the computer would scan the warehouse to see how many of us were giving that song a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down and train the algorithm according to our votes. The trouble was, despite our diligent training and curation of many Pandora stations, any station remotely related to rock would eventually converge on Morrissey. It got so bad that whenever a Morrissey song would play you could hear shouts of protest from across the warehouse and it would be immediately downvoted with extreme prejudice. Nevertheless it would keep feeding us Morrissey so the joke among us became “All stations lead to Morrissey”.
- smrq 3y ago
  I feel like many (most?) people who used Pandora extensively have a similar story, although curiously it never seems to be the same band. My fixed point was Radiohead's Karma Police, specifically. I wonder if your personal Pandora fixed point says something about you...
summarity 3y ago
> plain Spotify radio To be very fair, there's nothing plain whatsoever about Spotify's recommendations. Not only do they have the largest corpus of training data, their models are hard to beat.
- pragmatick 3y ago
  If only they suggested more than the same three or five songs by bands.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    I wish they had a way for me to say I'm not interested in something as well. For years there's been a few of the same albums recommended to me every day. Like, I've ignored them for this long and it's clear I'm not interested but the space for things I might actually listen to is still being wasted. What's worse is that they're not even obscure albums. Like, if I was ever going to get into the Eagles I would have already done so, I don't need to "discover" them.

Juliate 3y ago

Or maybe the similarities were just not in the perspective you expected? (two songs in widly distant genres/production styles can still be very similar on rythm, tonality, chords, tension, progression, structure, etc.)

wavemode 3y ago
It was actually the other way around. It would play me songs technically within the same broad genre (Hip Hop, RnB, Pop) but wildly different sound. It felt less like a music genome project and more like this typical nonsense streaming platforms do, "people who listen to song A, also tend to listen to song B".

Slow_Hand 3y ago

Haha, same. I used to work in a music equipment rental warehouse that was staffed by musicians and all day we would be curating and training our favorite Pandora stations. If a bad song came on the person closest to the computer would scan the warehouse to see how many of us were giving that song a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down and train the algorithm according to our votes. The trouble was, despite our diligent training and curation of many Pandora stations, any station remotely related to rock would eventually converge on Morrissey. It got so bad that whenever a Morrissey song would play you could hear shouts of protest from across the warehouse and it would be immediately downvoted with extreme prejudice. Nevertheless it would keep feeding us Morrissey so the joke among us became “All stations lead to Morrissey”.

smrq 3y ago
I feel like many (most?) people who used Pandora extensively have a similar story, although curiously it never seems to be the same band. My fixed point was Radiohead's Karma Police, specifically. I wonder if your personal Pandora fixed point says something about you...

summarity 3y ago

> plain Spotify radio To be very fair, there's nothing plain whatsoever about Spotify's recommendations. Not only do they have the largest corpus of training data, their models are hard to beat.

pragmatick 3y ago
If only they suggested more than the same three or five songs by bands.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  I wish they had a way for me to say I'm not interested in something as well. For years there's been a few of the same albums recommended to me every day. Like, I've ignored them for this long and it's clear I'm not interested but the space for things I might actually listen to is still being wasted. What's worse is that they're not even obscure albums. Like, if I was ever going to get into the Eagles I would have already done so, I don't need to "discover" them.