Pandora music map

I've been fiddling around with my Pandora stations a bit lately, marking songs that I like and dislike as I listen throughout the day at work. Unfortunately this caused my favorite stations to destabilize a bit and I started to hear a lot of music that I didn't want to hear or that didn't belong in that particular station. I finally had to resort to going into the Pandora control panel and 'rolling back' all of the likes and dislikes I've given recently to get my stations back in order.

This mini fiasco led me to wonder about Pandora's algorithm again. I'm not quite sure what action I took that caused some of the 'wrong' music to leak into my stations but I really wish I had visibility to the whole process behind Pandora. I've said before that I like the simple thumbs up/down model but I wish we had more advanced features available to us. I understand Pandora probably doesn't want to reveal its algorithm to the public but I think there are certain features it can add that would make Pandora better and easier to use.

One idea I like is adding a 'music map' view in Pandora. It would be pretty cool to see the music map representation of your stations and to see what sort of artists are at the core and fringe of your musical preferences. Maybe you want to hear a little bit more from a fringe artist, or a little bit less from a core artist? You could just drag the nodes of each artist in/out and have your station reflect that change. It would essentially be a visual representation of your music stations.



Another cool thing you could do with the music map feature is to see what effect an action you take will have on your station's feed. For example, when you're about to like or dislike a song, it would be pretty interesting to see on the music map what new nodes appear or what existing nodes move around. That way you can get a better feel for the composition of your station and what influence your actions are taking on it. This feature sure would have saved me a lot of hassle lately!

This new feature would also be really cool on the Pandora iPad app. The iPad's large interactive touch screen makes it ideal for playing around with a music map, and the feature would keep Pandora users more actively engaged while they're listening to their music. I think it would be a great addition to the "ultimate lean-in Pandora experience".