How Pandora missed the boat
I’ve been using Pandora since its release last year. I was skeptical about paying for a customized radio station when there are so many similar services. But I soon discovered how Pandora is different: it customizes stations in real time based on simple feedback (“I like this”, “I don’t like this”) per song. By the the time my free trial ran out (Pandora now offers a free advertising supported version), I wasn’t exactly a fan, but I was annoyed enough to purchase a quarterly subscription (which was extended to a yearly subscription by Pandora two months later).
I started using Pandora on a daily basis as my personal DJ and to find new music that I might not have heard otherwise. I loved rating each individual song and learning why certain songs were played. A typical response to “Why did you play this song?” resulted in something like “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this song because it features disco influences, a breathy female vocal” and so on.
I was really excited when I heard about the version 2 release of Pandora in November. The announcement email named features such as “bookmarking, station editing, playlist improvements and much fine-tuning.” Bookmarking (marking a song as a favorite so I can remember it later) is nice, and I’m sure ‘playlist improvements’ and ‘much fine-tuning’ resulted in some otherwise intangible improvements. What I was really interested in was station editing. I imagined seeing a customization panel for each station that I created, with a slider allowing me to adjust the individual characteristics of that station. I like disco influences, but if it sounded too disco I could always lower the “Disco influences” slider.
This may or may not be possible based on the current architecture of Pandora, but this is how I (and I’m guessing a lot of other people) want to customize a station. Rating songs is nice when you don’t want to deal with a (potentially complicated) station customization panel. After many hours of listening and rating, I’ve managed to get a few of my stations to a point where I really enjoy them. But if I can make a few adjustments to the musical characteristics to hear more or less what I want, why should I have to rate 100 or more songs to get there?
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