In Love with Pandora: Music recommendations
What’s better than finding a great thing, that works great and makes me endlessly happy without me having to do much work? Well if you like finding good music, Pandora is for you.
I’ve seen many other “auto recommend music for you” type things over the years but these guys have done it right. In my first half hour of use I found 5 CDs I wanted to buy (and was happy with when they arrived: including Neutral milk hotel, Wonderful Smith and an Elliot Smith CD I didn’t know about).
I was so happy with the results I paid the subscription fee straight away. Isn’t it worth a few bucks to get great recommendations for things? (Or perhaps I’m lame and need to make more music savvy friends :).
They now have a free version (ads) available and I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a flash based UI, but they should get an award for the smoothest & least annoying flash UI I’ve seen in some time. The station model took a few minutes to understand (you have to seed the recommendations process), but once I got it I haven’t thought about it again.
I have a lot of friends who think Pandora is great, but my mileage varied quite considerably.
The quality of recommendations depends on A) how much of your own music Pandora currently catalogues and B) how well Pandora understands the music it does have catalogued. My experience with Pandora was extremely frustrating because it lacked tracks that are representative of my tastes in a given genre and it tended to lump music under large umbrellas (e.g., it seemed to think that all electronic music is created equal). I failed to find any really good recommendations in the four or five stations that I created and used over the course of a week.
Worse, on my workstation (Linux P4 2.6GHz, 2GB), the Pandora plug-in created noticeable lags in performance for my other apps.
Good points – My sample size was small (um, one – me), but I had such great results.
The problems you describe are what I experienced with most of the other attempts at this – they quickly felt shallow and gave very predictable and uninspired recommendations.
I’m still using Pandora so we’ll see how it holds up over weeks of usage.
When I was at AT&T Research in the late 90s we worked on some music recommendation schemes in collaboration with a music conservatory. We found something of a 80/20 rule … if 80% of people could be covered by the 20% (or so) of music from the major labels and the genre classifications suggested by these labels.
Label genres are very different from those who are heavily into music … it is easy to identify a half dozen variants of ska and obscurities like IDM have numerous subcategories.
We found that 20% of the people (anyone who had strong preferences towards indie, classical or jazz to first order) we not satisfied by much other than being led by the suggestions of people who knew their tastes.
Pandora is an outstanding 80/20 recommendation system, but there is still a long way to go to satisfy people who feast on the tail.
I thought that Pandora doesn’t use genre classifications to recommend music. They claim, at least, that they analyzed the sound of the music song by song. This is probably at least somewhat better than just genre recommendations. Also, I do seem to get recommendations that cross genres.
I’ve been using Pandora for a few days now, and although at first it gave some odd recommendations, I have since found that rating the songs it plays is very important. It quickly became more narrowed to my tastes; while still crossing genre’s, it now played music that was noticably similar to my preferences. (this seemed to make the umbrella much smaller)
Just giving it a song to start from isn’t doing much to show it your preferences, you must help it refine your tastes, and thus it’s choices. Perhaps Mikol Graves above wasn’t rating the music it played? Or maybe it just isn’t right for everyone. It’s still worth a shot though, as it’s worked for many already.
I suppose there are so many variables in providing recommendations, even when it’s two intelligent human beings involved. So I’m not surprised people have very different reactions to things like Pandora (and it’s part of why there is no dominant brand in products like these)
I have been using Pandora for about 3 weeks and really like it. I created a station based on an artist with a distinct style and found that the initial recommendations were ok – but that the station played a few selections that were not a good fit with my expectations.
Anyhow, I kept up with the station updating the “Songs You Liked” and “Songs You Don’t Like” selections whenever the station played a song that was a particularly good or bad fit. I have also occasionally added an artists that I particularly liked and now have 11 artists under “Items You Added” about 20 tunes under “Songs You Liked” and 8 under “Songs You Didn’t Like”. Since it only takes a couple of seconds to make these tweaks as the station is plays, I consider this a very minimal effort.
Bottom line: I now have a station that plays a very good selection of songs that matches my selection very closely.