The web-based, personalized radio service of Pandora is fast approaching its one-year anniversary, and we’re wondering: Does anyone even use this fucking thing?
In a recent profile in the New York Times, the site claims three million registered users but still no profits (revenues are generated from advertisements and commission on sales elicited from “buy” links).
Here’s NYT‘s breakdown:
Bit by bit, Pandora?s music analysts have built a massive archive of data, cataloging the minute characteristics of more than 500,000 songs, from alt-country to bossa nova to metal to gospel, for what is known as the Music Genome Project.At pandora.com visitors are invited to enter the name of their favorite artist or song and to get in return a stream of music with similar ?DNA,? in effect a private Internet radio station microtailored to each user?s tastes.
The article describes a process in which music analysts “rate hundreds of traits” of each of Pandora’s over 500,000 songs on a five-point scale, but our brief test run suggested a basic system built on tagging of similar-sounding artists, yielding unimaginative, predictable playlists. That is, when we picked Jay-Z and The Beatles, we weren’t expecting The Grey Album (obvs), but were hoping for something a little more creative than Biggie Smalls followed by The Who followed by Diddy. Not sure what we wanted to hear but, like, isn’t that the point?
Granted, we didn’t play long enough to personalize our stations with track-by-track votes (given by a thumbs up or down), so we’re looking to you to convince us of the service’s merits (or to share your skepticism). As far as we can tell, they may need more adroit splicers to fuse that DNA.
But this may be the most compelling argument for Pandora yet; Tech Recipes tells you how to rip and save Pandora-played music to MP3 files! (Link via Lifehacker.) Maybe the service ain’t too bad, after all.
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yahoo’s launchcast has done the same thing for years…
i much prefer it.
Saw this on Pitchfork today -> http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/news/38701/Beck_and_Devendra_Are_Friends#38701
I could be way off on this but… I was just at the beck site and I think Devendra Banhart was in one of the backgrounds?
This might be old news but its the first time I’ve been to his site in a while, and i hadn’t heard anything about it.
Posted by: Ben at September 15, 2006 12:38 AM
BOOYAH SUCKERS!
I don’t use it. I’d rather play hit-or-miss with MP3 blogs.
yahoo’s launchcast has done the same thing for years…
i much prefer it.
yahoo’s launchcast has done the same thing for years…
i much prefer it.
I love Pandora. I use it at least 3 or 4 times a week for a good length of time. I have legitimately found new artists through it and have even bought albums based on what it has played for me. Maybe it depends on what music you put in there but it definitely has found some very obscure artists for me.
Another cool thing is if someone tells me about an artist I’ll pop them into Pandora just to hear a few tracks. It’s better than a 30 second sample off itunes or blogs. MySpace doesn’t always pan out so it usually gives you a good feel for the artist.
Sorry to sound like a commercial but I really do think Pandora kicks ass.
I ran Pandora through its paces a few months ago. Maybe the service is like that test you take on eHarmony that determines your perfect mate, but no matter what I plugged in, eventually Bjork and Tom Waits would be on the playlist. Subconscious theme running through my musical tastes, or does Tom & Bjork own the website?
pandora sucks all ass. i’ve tried using it about 40 different times with different bands and it NEVER has introduced me to an even half decent band i hadn’t heard of.
i tried to like pandora for a long time.
i like the concept of it, but it’s always playing music that i hate. it only lets you skip tracks a few times, and then it won’t let you anymore. everytime that happens, i turn it off and just play music that i like.
Funny, I just read this the other day — 15 Ways to Get More out of Pandora: http://www.lifehacker.com/software/pandora/technophilia-15-ways-to-get-more-out-of-pandora-201072.php
Maybe it’ll get you to like it (although I never use it either).
I’m glad to finally read someone else isn’t that thrilled about Pandora. All my friends like it, but I just thought it introduced me to bands I already knew.
I really like Finetune.com much more. I just joined and have been playing around with it for a week or so and it’s much better than Pandora. It’s like Pandora+last.fm+making mixtapes for your friends. Users can add artists/albums/songs to their favorites and can tag them any way they see fit. They can create as many playlists as they like using songs available in the Finetune database. There’s even an embeddable flash player you can put up on your MySpace or blog to share your playlists. The site’s in beta, so they’re adding new artists and albums every week. I’m psyched to see what other functionality is in the works, too. It’s been really fun to play with!
Dude you guys are fucking wrong. This service rocks if you spend some time tweaking the output. It’s turned me on to all kinds of new songs and artists: these programmers have something special here.
Forget what others say, give it a whirl and it will actually improve your life somewhat.
My favourite part is when I’m vibing along to an increasingly impressive string of songs that I adore – all computer-created – based on one or two bits of input. The piece-de-resistance is when it plays some obscure shit that I’ve already got somewhere on the iPod which I came across a long while back, all with minimal intervention on my part.
I agree with the person above.
Pandora is doing a “Town Hall” Meeting in L.A. sometime next week — I might hit it up and I’ll get a full report on over.
last.fm FTW!
And mog.com is an up and comer.
I’ve used Pandora a couple of times, though I haven’t really gotten into it yet. Therefore I can’t say whether I think it rocks or not. Seems pretty good so far, though, and it can provide some pretty cool stuff.
I love Pandora, but I agree that it gets shit wrong ALOT. You have to be specific with what you want to hear. My Kinks station was horrible, but my Zombies station was great. Same for my Nilsson station. You can’t type in something as broad as Radiohead or The Beatles and expect it to know exactly what it is about that sound that you’re looking for.
Without Pandora, I never would have found The Action, Biff Rose or The Move; all phenomenal artists that I bought CDs of after hearing them first on Pandora.
Damn, some of you posters can be cynical bastards. Pandora is free. If you don’t like it, don’t use it! You don’t really have a right to complain if it doesn’t cost you a cent.
I went with islands and pandora spouted out three good songs in a row by bands it seemed like I should know but dont (kashmir, oranger [they recorded something with kanneberg once], and Huey Lewis [who sounds familiar])
from what i’ve heard of Pandora in my two-person office, it’s ok but spotty. of course, the new music’s always heard through tinny computer speakers, so that takes off a few points…but I know it has its evangelists.
also, I remember some sort of late-90s Pandora-like “streaming radio station”. You had to fill out about 8 pages of pulldowns on your preferences (choosing between “strongly like” and “strongly dislike, basically) for different bands. then you’d listen for eight minutes and realize your time had been wasted. does anyone remember the name of that thing?
dsven:
we DOn’t use it. that’s the point. it’s called a discussion. didn’t you read the question prompt?
we’re not complaining about the price, we’re simply commenting that it doesn’t work well enough for us to become passionate devotees. is that ok with you?
basic example: you’re in the mood, so you tell pandora that you like, oh, joanna newsom for example. what does it do? it plays the same 6 songs over and over. why? i don’t know. all i know is that i don’t like any of those songs.
maybe my musical taste just crashes their system. i don’t know. that’s o.k. with me. i’m sure other people have made great discoveries with it.
Pandora simply rocks. I got to talk to the founder Tim Westergren today when he came to town on a tour stop.
How often do get a chance to have a face to face chat with the founder of YOUR favorite music streaming service?
Blog post:
http://pandorastations.blogspot.com/2006/09/meetup.html
last.fm is verrrrrrrrryyyy awesome. everyone should check it out if they haven’t.
I love the fact that radio is not geared to me. I dont want to hear music that is familiar, i want to hear a sound or style that i have never heard before.
Pandora is a solid service. You might have to take minute investing time in it and maybe doing some background on artists you’re unfamiliar with, but overall the software is good and worthwhile.
I liked Pandora to begin with, but it seemed that as it went along, each station got farther and farther from my intention. I did finally re-read the section on finetuning, though. I have ditched most of my stations and am going to give it another try.
Some people said it before, but Last.fm is the best. It totally works for me. The recommendation radio or similar to artist radio are great. I ended up discovering great things thanks to those functions. Also, they have an option to listen to them webbased without installing anything, for when at the uni or at the office where you can’t download things.
And it’s wonderful to keep track of everything you’ve been playing. I’m close to 20.000 songs by now, and I really enjoy seeing the charts and stuff.
Also, I met some really nice people through Last.fm.
The problem with Pandora’s “DNA” concept, to me, seems to be that it can’t touch the soul of a song. The “DNA” that they speak of might be the same between tracks from Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” and some high-schooler’s MBox home recordings, but that doesn’t mean there’s any real comparison between the two.
I’ve tried using Pandora, but I keep hearing music that I don’t feel is worth my time. I’ll stick to suggestions from real people (and the real people behind bitchin’ sites like this one).
choose radiohead and get a bunch of radiohead knockoffs who sound like radiohead but without soul, energy, spirit, or talent. to me, this is a problem with the music genome project.
another vote for lastfm
Pandora and Last.fm use different models for making recommendations, as I discuss here:
http://www.claudepate.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=541
(Though you’ll have to scroll past a Tom Waits review to read it.)
The “genome” model means rating tracks is much more important to Pandora than it is to Last.fm.
Pandora’s cool, but i don’t listen to music the way it strings it together. I never make playlists based on “minor key tonality, prominent horn sections, blah blah blah.” I think there’s too many personal and impossible to predict factors to ones music taste… Pandora’s not going to know you just broke up with your girlfriend and you need “drink myself into a coma” music.. you feed it elliott smith, it’s just going to think you like acoustic guitars.
I’m listening to Pandora right now. I’ve only discovered a few bands from it but I still enjoy it. It’s great once you learn how to tweak it. The 15 tips are very helpful. I use the stand alone player which works much better then the embedded version.
Why does radio have to be about discovering new bands? What’s wrong with being surprised with songs or bands you didn’t think you would hear? I don’t understand the problem with Pandora? I use it all of the time, and compared to Last.fm’s invasive Audioscrobbler thing it’s a breeze. I might not find too many new things, but I work in the biz and hear a lot. In the experimental/ambient realm, Pandora.com can’t be beat. And it sounds like none of you have created multi-artist radio stations, which is totally the way to go. I’m sorry, Amrit and posters, but you guys are wrong on this one, and talking about using it to hack music is just lame. It makes you sound like the frat boys of indie rock.
YES, krup, YES! That’s exactly how I feel. Maybe I expected too much, but it just doesn’t seem to capture why I like a certain band. One band might make a terrific song that happens to feature a “prominent horn section,” but another song sharing that same, random characteristic might totally suck ass.
And if you enter an artist, every other song Pandora plays is from THAT ARTIST. I thought the objective was to introduce me to new music?
YES, krup, YES! That’s exactly how I feel. Maybe I expected too much, but it just doesn’t seem to capture why I like a certain band. One band might make a terrific song that happens to feature a “prominent horn section,” but another song sharing that same, random characteristic might totally suck ass.
And if you enter an artist, every other song Pandora plays is from THAT ARTIST. I thought the objective was to introduce me to new music?
YES, krup, YES! That’s exactly how I feel. Maybe I expected too much, but it just doesn’t seem to capture why I like a certain band. One band might make a terrific song that happens to feature a “prominent horn section,” but another song sharing that same, random characteristic might totally suck ass.
And if you enter an artist, every other song Pandora plays is from THAT ARTIST. I thought the objective was to introduce me to new music?
YES, krup, YES! That’s exactly how I feel. Maybe I expected too much, but it just doesn’t seem to capture why I like a certain band. One band might make a terrific song that happens to feature a “prominent horn section,” but another song sharing that same, random characteristic might totally suck ass.
And if you enter an artist, every other song Pandora plays is from THAT ARTIST. I thought the objective was to introduce me to new music?
YES, krup, YES! That’s exactly how I feel. Maybe I expected too much, but it just doesn’t seem to capture why I like a certain band. One band might make a terrific song that happens to feature a “prominent horn section,” but another song sharing that same, random characteristic might totally suck ass.
And if you enter an artist, every other song Pandora plays is from THAT ARTIST. I thought the objective was to introduce me to new music?
YES, krup, YES! That’s exactly how I feel. Maybe I expected too much, but it just doesn’t seem to capture why I like a certain band. One band might make a terrific song that happens to feature a “prominent horn section,” but another song sharing that same, random characteristic might totally suck ass.
And if you enter an artist, every other song Pandora plays is from THAT ARTIST. I thought the objective was to introduce me to new music?
it’s all about MOG.com
I’m glad my comment showed up like 20 times. Awkward…
I was listening to my Cut Copy station for about 30 minutes before they played ‘Current of Love’ by David Hasselhoff. I won’t give away my verict on Pandora just yet, but that just might factor into it.