7 ms·

Pandora: From near-death to profitability in a year

42 points by jrwoodruff 17y ago

jrwoodruff 17y ago
Glad to see these guys doing well, I've been a rabid fan since a friend turned me onto the service four(ish) years ago. Although I don't entirely understand the last line of the article "Pandora will be a textbook case for why execution matters more than vision in tech" I get that they've worked their asses off to make it a reality, I think the vision of smart music recommendation and discovery is what drove the execution. ??
skolor 17y ago
Pandora is the only service that I regularly think "I should be paying these guys money". In fact, a while back I decided that the next time I hit the 40 hour limit I will be upgrading my account with them. In case anyone working with/at Pandora is reading this: you guys are awesome. I've gotten more new music from you than anywhere else. I noticed you seem to have changed your algorithm lately (At least, in the past few weeks I've suddenly gotten a LOT of new music) and I like it a lot.
- Estragon 17y ago
  That's basically what happened with me, except that I didn't wait to hit the 40 hours.
- rgr 17y ago
  I like Pandora a lot but a couple of months ago I switched to last.fm because it gave me more variety. Maybe it's time to check out Pandora again -- though last.fm is still 100% free.
  - mapleoin 17y ago
    don't forget available outside the US
  - superjohan 17y ago
    "last.fm is still 100% free." Except in other countries than the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement
  - cmos 17y ago
    I just switched to last.fm from Pandora. The last straw was the same video ad for 'Mercy hospital' every single time I changed stations. I have to admit that listening to last.fm is a completely different experience. There are a much deeper selection of tracks and I was thrilled to hear a 24 minute DJ Shadow song. I wish pandora the best, and I was ok with the occasional video ad. But every time I change a station? If it was every 3rd time I might have put up with it.
    - skolor 17y ago
      How often are you changing stations? I tend to only change stations every couple of hours, if that often. It seems like frequent station changing defeats the purpose of music discovery, because of how Pandora seems to react when changing stations. If I change a station, listen to an entire song, and then change back, it (seems) to reset the "play things I know skolor likes before branching out into new things". I don't have any data at all on it, but after I have a sufficiently mature station (50+ "liked" songs, or so) it seems to mostly play through 10-20 songs before introducing any new songs I've never heard before. My main complaint with Last.FM is that it makes me putting a label on what I like in music, and then match that up with how other people label music. I know next to nothing about music, I just know I like certain songs and dislike others (Ok, I know a little more than that, but not much). When I used Last.FM I would pick a genre/tag I liked/artist, listen for a while, and get bored with it because it either sounded exactly the same or else I picked the wrong tag and it turns out that wasn't the factor in the original music I liked.
    - paul9290 17y ago
      Coding at my new job I tried out Pandora and after a few days I kept hearing the same music. My test is eclectic and I like hearing folk to jazz to alternative to 80s to etc ... Pandora does not seem to offer this type of station, but Last.fm does as if you trained it via a plug in it knows exactly what genres you like and the artists in those genres. Also, I use Fire.fm firefox last.fm toolbar which is great as it puts play controls right into firefox and last.fm does not need to be open!
      - skolor 17y ago
manny 17y ago
just putting out there that pandora totally crushes deezer and last.fm when it comes to music selection for artists or songs you enter in.
blhack 17y ago
Perhaps I am weird but every time pandora recommends me a song and I really like it, I bookmark it. I do this so that if I end up deciding I want to buy it, I can click through to amazon from them and get them some referal money :). It really says something about how good you are doing if people will go out of their way to make sure you get paid.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
vaksel 17y ago
I started out with Pandora, but then they added that 40 hour limit, seeing as how I have the radio on 24/7, I hit that the 3rd day. So I started looking for alternatives and quickly found grooveshark, they completely blow Pandora out of the water with their selection and you can actually pick the actual song you want to play right away. Their autoplay feature is a little bit less refined than Pandoras, but I actually like that, since with Pandora I ended up listening to the same 30-40 songs over and over again, since it kept reccomending the same songs.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- physcab 17y ago
  Thanks! I'll pass the good feedback on to the rest of our team. We're working hard to bring you more features. I'm actually working on the autoplay algorithm right now so any feedback is quite helpful. Drop me a line anytime. Chris from Grooveshark
  - sarvesh 17y ago
    I use Grooveshark and I agree that the autoplay is very naive compared to Pandora. A better autoplay algorithm will definitely help but it is hard give you feedback unless we know what you are trying to do with the new algorithm. Currently, correct me if am wrong, your algorithm for recommendation is heavily biased toward genre. It is really hard to discover new songs that I like with it and that's when I fall back to Pandora.
    - endtime 17y ago
      I like how you and vaksel gave diametrically opposed suggestions...poor Chris.
      - physcab 17y ago
        Haha you'd be surprised by how many people love the current autoplay despite it's drawbacks. I have a feeling we're not hearing from the people who don't like it because they end up going to Pandora for better recs. I think it's a problem we can solve though. By our next product launch we'll have the logic in place to make both user groups happy.
rscott 17y ago
I'm a huge Pandora fan as well. For some reason one day I decided to quickly profess my love for them via email and actually got a response asking if I wanted a shirt or hat. This blew my mind, and I rock my Pandora baseball tee often as a result.
- litewulf 17y ago
  I got a hat. I treasure that hat like it were my first born. Its amazing how much more highly I think of them for basically just throwing out hats.
  - hyperbovine 17y ago
    You have stumbled onto my all-encompassing Theory of Service: people love getting comped. No matter how cheap or silly, if it came for free people will remember you fondly for it and give you their business in the future. And they will probably blog and post on HN about it too :) If I ever open a restaurant I am going to randomly dispense free appetizers and desserts. If I ever run a (freemium) startup, I am going to randomly give away free accounts. Not to everyone, not so much that it hurts the bottom line, but enough that the buzz and goodwill generated outweighs whatever loss I'm taking.
    - skolor 17y ago
      There is definitely a limit there. No matter how cheap or silly, as long as it doesn't seem cheap, if it came for free people will remember. The times I have been given something free that is particularly cheaply made, usually something made out of very low quality plastic, I always think "Oh, these guys evidently don't care about their users/fans/supporters, if they're going to give me something that won't last 10 minutes".
    - litewulf 17y ago
      I think its important to give away things that are not your core business. I like the pandora hat and I remember it fondly, but if my coworker got a super-awesome pandora account, I think I would just feel "dang, why didn't I get one".
zackattack 17y ago
This is excellent news for Hip Hop Goblin!
- Raphael 17y ago
  Every day you're hustlin'.
The_Lost_Hacker 17y ago
Pandora is great when I want to set it and forget it, despite the fact that it repeats the same damn songs over and over again. I've spent hours hitting the "don't play this song for a month" button and still never really hear a new song for that channel. That said, GrooveShark is my new love affair. Any song any time, custom play-lists, and the interface just rocks. I really should be paying them.

42 points by jrwoodruff 17y ago

Glad to see these guys doing well, I've been a rabid fan since a friend turned me onto the service four(ish) years ago. Although I don't entirely understand the last line of the article "Pandora will be a textbook case for why execution matters more than vision in tech" I get that they've worked their asses off to make it a reality, I think the vision of smart music recommendation and discovery is what drove the execution. ??

skolor 17y ago

Pandora is the only service that I regularly think "I should be paying these guys money". In fact, a while back I decided that the next time I hit the 40 hour limit I will be upgrading my account with them. In case anyone working with/at Pandora is reading this: you guys are awesome. I've gotten more new music from you than anywhere else. I noticed you seem to have changed your algorithm lately (At least, in the past few weeks I've suddenly gotten a LOT of new music) and I like it a lot.

Estragon 17y ago
That's basically what happened with me, except that I didn't wait to hit the 40 hours.
rgr 17y ago
I like Pandora a lot but a couple of months ago I switched to last.fm because it gave me more variety. Maybe it's time to check out Pandora again -- though last.fm is still 100% free.
- mapleoin 17y ago
  don't forget available outside the US
- superjohan 17y ago
  "last.fm is still 100% free." Except in other countries than the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement
- cmos 17y ago
  I just switched to last.fm from Pandora. The last straw was the same video ad for 'Mercy hospital' every single time I changed stations. I have to admit that listening to last.fm is a completely different experience. There are a much deeper selection of tracks and I was thrilled to hear a 24 minute DJ Shadow song. I wish pandora the best, and I was ok with the occasional video ad. But every time I change a station? If it was every 3rd time I might have put up with it.
  - skolor 17y ago
    How often are you changing stations? I tend to only change stations every couple of hours, if that often. It seems like frequent station changing defeats the purpose of music discovery, because of how Pandora seems to react when changing stations. If I change a station, listen to an entire song, and then change back, it (seems) to reset the "play things I know skolor likes before branching out into new things". I don't have any data at all on it, but after I have a sufficiently mature station (50+ "liked" songs, or so) it seems to mostly play through 10-20 songs before introducing any new songs I've never heard before. My main complaint with Last.FM is that it makes me putting a label on what I like in music, and then match that up with how other people label music. I know next to nothing about music, I just know I like certain songs and dislike others (Ok, I know a little more than that, but not much). When I used Last.FM I would pick a genre/tag I liked/artist, listen for a while, and get bored with it because it either sounded exactly the same or else I picked the wrong tag and it turns out that wasn't the factor in the original music I liked.
  - paul9290 17y ago
    Coding at my new job I tried out Pandora and after a few days I kept hearing the same music. My test is eclectic and I like hearing folk to jazz to alternative to 80s to etc ... Pandora does not seem to offer this type of station, but Last.fm does as if you trained it via a plug in it knows exactly what genres you like and the artists in those genres. Also, I use Fire.fm firefox last.fm toolbar which is great as it puts play controls right into firefox and last.fm does not need to be open!
    - skolor 17y ago

manny 17y ago

just putting out there that pandora totally crushes deezer and last.fm when it comes to music selection for artists or songs you enter in.

blhack 17y ago

Perhaps I am weird but every time pandora recommends me a song and I really like it, I bookmark it. I do this so that if I end up deciding I want to buy it, I can click through to amazon from them and get them some referal money :). It really says something about how good you are doing if people will go out of their way to make sure you get paid.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

vaksel 17y ago

I started out with Pandora, but then they added that 40 hour limit, seeing as how I have the radio on 24/7, I hit that the 3rd day. So I started looking for alternatives and quickly found grooveshark, they completely blow Pandora out of the water with their selection and you can actually pick the actual song you want to play right away. Their autoplay feature is a little bit less refined than Pandoras, but I actually like that, since with Pandora I ended up listening to the same 30-40 songs over and over again, since it kept reccomending the same songs.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
physcab 17y ago
Thanks! I'll pass the good feedback on to the rest of our team. We're working hard to bring you more features. I'm actually working on the autoplay algorithm right now so any feedback is quite helpful. Drop me a line anytime. Chris from Grooveshark
- sarvesh 17y ago
  I use Grooveshark and I agree that the autoplay is very naive compared to Pandora. A better autoplay algorithm will definitely help but it is hard give you feedback unless we know what you are trying to do with the new algorithm. Currently, correct me if am wrong, your algorithm for recommendation is heavily biased toward genre. It is really hard to discover new songs that I like with it and that's when I fall back to Pandora.
  - endtime 17y ago
    I like how you and vaksel gave diametrically opposed suggestions...poor Chris.
    - physcab 17y ago
      Haha you'd be surprised by how many people love the current autoplay despite it's drawbacks. I have a feeling we're not hearing from the people who don't like it because they end up going to Pandora for better recs. I think it's a problem we can solve though. By our next product launch we'll have the logic in place to make both user groups happy.

rscott 17y ago

I'm a huge Pandora fan as well. For some reason one day I decided to quickly profess my love for them via email and actually got a response asking if I wanted a shirt or hat. This blew my mind, and I rock my Pandora baseball tee often as a result.

litewulf 17y ago
I got a hat. I treasure that hat like it were my first born. Its amazing how much more highly I think of them for basically just throwing out hats.
- hyperbovine 17y ago
  You have stumbled onto my all-encompassing Theory of Service: people love getting comped. No matter how cheap or silly, if it came for free people will remember you fondly for it and give you their business in the future. And they will probably blog and post on HN about it too :) If I ever open a restaurant I am going to randomly dispense free appetizers and desserts. If I ever run a (freemium) startup, I am going to randomly give away free accounts. Not to everyone, not so much that it hurts the bottom line, but enough that the buzz and goodwill generated outweighs whatever loss I'm taking.
  - skolor 17y ago
    There is definitely a limit there. No matter how cheap or silly, as long as it doesn't seem cheap, if it came for free people will remember. The times I have been given something free that is particularly cheaply made, usually something made out of very low quality plastic, I always think "Oh, these guys evidently don't care about their users/fans/supporters, if they're going to give me something that won't last 10 minutes".
  - litewulf 17y ago
    I think its important to give away things that are not your core business. I like the pandora hat and I remember it fondly, but if my coworker got a super-awesome pandora account, I think I would just feel "dang, why didn't I get one".

zackattack 17y ago

This is excellent news for Hip Hop Goblin!

Raphael 17y ago
Every day you're hustlin'.

The_Lost_Hacker 17y ago

Pandora is great when I want to set it and forget it, despite the fact that it repeats the same damn songs over and over again. I've spent hours hitting the "don't play this song for a month" button and still never really hear a new song for that channel. That said, GrooveShark is my new love affair. Any song any time, custom play-lists, and the interface just rocks. I really should be paying them.