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Music Oracle: Pandora
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The CTO of Pandora was nice enough to point out Pandora is now open for everyone (this is why I love blogging). So I gave it a shot.
First off, unlike Scoble, I actually like the flash interface. Works well enough for me. Nothing to download, runs right from the browser.
The interface is good. Very simple, which is exactly the right way to do it. Let’s take a moment to appreciate an interface that could’ve had a million buttons but only has a few. Good.
The basic idea is: starting with an artist you like, Pandora will guide you to other music you might like. It uses a radio metaphor; you create a radio station by specifying an artist or a song, and music streams to you, from that artist and other related artists. You can’t forward or rewind songs or go back to previously played songs. It uses the music genome project to form its recommendations, which apparently is based on fairly deep analysis of the various musical qualities such as temp, style, etc. Pandora will tell you why it chose a particular song to play, quite a neat little feature.
My first attempt was N.E.R.D., a group I’m just getting into. The next immediate recommendation was excellent, but alas I lost it when I switched from the in brower to the pop-up interface. Is there a way to get history?
Interestingly, N.E.R.D. is not available on Pandora. More interestingly, this didn’t bother me. I already know them; that’s what I’m starting from. I’m much more interested in the new artists Pandora can lead me to. In fact, the most useful thing Pandora could do for me is lead me to new music that I don’t already have in my collection, and hence haven’t heard a million times on my mp3 player.
So I tried a few others:
Beatles led me to Billy Joel and Elton John, which I suppose are reasonable suggestions, but I definitely can’t listen to. For some reason I didn’t hit the “I don’t like it” button; I just moved on.
I tried Oasis next. Not sure where that took me, but I gave up on that too,
PM Dawn next. Not great, didn’t really capture what makes them different from the other groups in the same genre. Gave up.
Maxwell didn’t go anywhere good either.
Cheb Khaled and Cheb were not recognized as artists Pandora knows. That’s not good. I guess US music only? That’ll be a problem.
Coldplay was not available but took me to The Perishers, which I liked. Cool.
Ok, so for the most part it didn’t work out for me, but I still like the service. I know I’m a pain to please and have odd tastes, so I’m not really surprised it didn’t work great for me. Generally speaking I dislike a lot more than I like, so it’s hard to find a recommendation I would actually like. That first recommendation on N.E.R.D. was really good, so that could’ve been something.
Now to complaints and suggestions: where’s the button to export my “stations” into a playlist or RSS? Remember, all my data are belong to me.
How about some pre-made radio stations? I know this is based on my preferences, but I don’t want to have to always enter an artist to start things off. Give me a way to turn off my brain and just listen.
Hmm. Second take on the interface: give me a way to rewind. Let me listen to that song agin.
Overall, I quite liked Pandora. Not sure if I’ll end up using it or if it’ll fall by the wayside. It does require you to actively participate in choosing your music, which is a good thing, except that music is usually background to the other 19 tasks I got going on, and I’m not necessarily looking for a 20th.
Would I pay for it? Don’t know. Maybe. I have Yahoo Music Unlimited, but if I didn’t have that, this might be attractive.
I’ll continue to try it out. Hopefully as it learns about me it’ll magically choose great new songs and I won’t have to actively participate in choosing things, returning to my favored vegetative state.
I gave it a shot. I generally don’t have very good luck with sites like this, including the earlier incarnations of Yahoo Launch. Apparently I didn’t start with a popular enough artist, because the first twelve songs consisted of three original artist herself and two from an American Idol runner-up. The AI songs themselves weren’t horrible, so I didn’t want to give them a thumbs-down, but I wish there were a way to gently steer the interface away from an artist without making a huge switch.
In an attempt to get a more diverse sample, I added three very different artists after four or five songs. It didn’t seem to change the results…adding three guy bands still gave me an all-female roster. I like this music, so I again didn’t want to thumbs-down it….instead I just moved on. That’s when I ran into licensing issues. You can only fast-forward so many times in a given time period. Unfortunately, this pretty much counts me out as a Pandora member….until it got to know my tastes WAY better, I would want the ability to fast forward quite a bit. Again unfortunately, I’m not sure how well it can gather my tastes with a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-way-down approach. The thumbs-down eliminates the song from the playlist entirely, and probably poisons the well for that artist. That was one positive of the old Yahoo Launch system; I could rate each song/artist/album on a 0-100 scale, giving the fine-tuned control that Pandora just doesn’t offer.
I’ve decided that music selection is an important choice for me. I’ve stopped listening to my favorite radio station because they’ve gotten too eclectic…for every song I like, there are three songs in different genres that I hate. Their “huge iPod on shuffle” mentality has backfired. IF I spent money on streaming music at all (which is already a stretch), I’d rather go for the Yahoo Unlimited version where I can choose EVERY song. Then the trick would be choosing ENOUGH songs to avoid boredom, which I don’t think would be a problem. Alternatively, I wouldn’t be averse to spending some time “training” the network. I remember Launch providing some great recommendations after searching for all my favorite artists/albums and rating them highly. Until Pandora allows more fast-forwarding or some additional input from the user, all it will be is a recommendation site for little-known artists that happen to sound like my favorites.
PS- As a follow-up, I continued listening to Pandora while I wrote my comment. Seven more songs…still all-female, two more duplicate artists, and still no ability to fast-forward. I don’t know how many more I have to sit through before I can skip, but Pandora isn’t going to keep me around long enough to find out….I’m gone. Yes, I have too much time on my hands and I may be hyper-critical, but making me happy could make them a lifetime customer. Instead, I’m a lost cause. The Music Genome Project needs some work.