Showing posts with label Pandora. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pandora. Show all posts
Best of the 90's
I've had to do a bit of clean up lately on my Pandora profile as my top station has started to resemble a "Best of 90's Rock" soundtrack. I guess when you 'thumbs up' a couple Weezer and Smashing Pumpkin songs the Pandora algorithm thinks you'll also like any rock before 1999, even though all the other music on your station is pretty current. If only Pandora had advanced controls or a way to visually map the changes on your stations...
Music moods
Just last week I wrote about a new feature I'd like Pandora to add (music maps) and this week I've read about some new music sites that have this and other cool features included. I stumbled upon these sites through an article in Mashable called "5 great ways to find music that suits your mood".
A couple sites, like Musicovery, have the music map feature, but more interestingly all the sites listed try to match the music to your current mood. I think this is a great idea that would suit me really well. I have my 'Rock' station, and my 'Hip-Hop' station, but sometimes I want my Rock & Hip-Hop to match the mood I'm in right now. Am I in a mellow rocky mood, or a hard party rock mood? Do I want Hip-Hop that I can nod my head to, or do I want Hip-Hop to get me pumped and ready for the night? Sure, I could make Pandora stations for each mood, but overall I think the artists (and even albums) would overlap. It's really the individual songs and the feelings they invoke that would be driven by the "mood" settings.
I'll probably give one or two of these sites a spin and see how well they categorize "mood" at the song level. I wonder how their music catalog selection holds up against Pandora and the other bigger online players. Really I just want Pandora to add this feature so I don't have to keep track of multiple music sites and can keep all my musical preferences in one spot.
A couple sites, like Musicovery, have the music map feature, but more interestingly all the sites listed try to match the music to your current mood. I think this is a great idea that would suit me really well. I have my 'Rock' station, and my 'Hip-Hop' station, but sometimes I want my Rock & Hip-Hop to match the mood I'm in right now. Am I in a mellow rocky mood, or a hard party rock mood? Do I want Hip-Hop that I can nod my head to, or do I want Hip-Hop to get me pumped and ready for the night? Sure, I could make Pandora stations for each mood, but overall I think the artists (and even albums) would overlap. It's really the individual songs and the feelings they invoke that would be driven by the "mood" settings.
I'll probably give one or two of these sites a spin and see how well they categorize "mood" at the song level. I wonder how their music catalog selection holds up against Pandora and the other bigger online players. Really I just want Pandora to add this feature so I don't have to keep track of multiple music sites and can keep all my musical preferences in one spot.
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".
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".
Facebook in my Pandora
As part of Facebook's new OpenGraph initiative the site has selected a couple key partners to share information with regarding user's preferences. One of those partners is Pandora, and this weekend while I was listening to my music stations I started noticing the following pop-ups show up on various artists & songs:
Whenever one of my Facebook friends likes the song or artist currently playing on my station, Pandora lets me know with a little image like the one above. Also, I can see a list of stations that my Facebook friends listen to, and I imagine they can see the stations I listen to.
All of this is pretty cool except for one thing: Pandora and Facebook never asked me if it was OK to do this! I don't remember ever telling Pandora to share my music preferences with everyone I know on Facebook. What if I secretly listened to Britney Spears or Miley Cirus and never told my friends about this shameful secret? All of a sudden everyone knows!
This is somewhat of a silly example, but I think it illustrates the privacy concerns around Facebook's OpenGraph initiative and the amount of data that can be shared. Right now you have to actively opt-out of the sharing service instead of having to explicitly opt-in, which is a bit concerning. I wonder if there will be a huge backlash against Facebook just like with the Beacon debacle. Anyways, I'm off to review my Facebook privacy settings to tighten up the information they can share about me with others.
Whenever one of my Facebook friends likes the song or artist currently playing on my station, Pandora lets me know with a little image like the one above. Also, I can see a list of stations that my Facebook friends listen to, and I imagine they can see the stations I listen to.All of this is pretty cool except for one thing: Pandora and Facebook never asked me if it was OK to do this! I don't remember ever telling Pandora to share my music preferences with everyone I know on Facebook. What if I secretly listened to Britney Spears or Miley Cirus and never told my friends about this shameful secret? All of a sudden everyone knows!
This is somewhat of a silly example, but I think it illustrates the privacy concerns around Facebook's OpenGraph initiative and the amount of data that can be shared. Right now you have to actively opt-out of the sharing service instead of having to explicitly opt-in, which is a bit concerning. I wonder if there will be a huge backlash against Facebook just like with the Beacon debacle. Anyways, I'm off to review my Facebook privacy settings to tighten up the information they can share about me with others.
40 hours of Pandora
Hmmm, I didn't realize that Pandora had a limit of 40 hours of listening per month:
I guess I could just pay the $0.99 they're asking for, but instead I think I'm going to take this time to play around with Last.fm and Slacker radio. I've heard good things about these services so I'm going to give them a spin and see how they stack up against Pandora.
I guess I could just pay the $0.99 they're asking for, but instead I think I'm going to take this time to play around with Last.fm and Slacker radio. I've heard good things about these services so I'm going to give them a spin and see how they stack up against Pandora.
Pandora stations
I'm really digging my Pandora stations lately. I have my stations pretty much right where I want them in terms of moods and musical styling. I have my "Damien Rice" station for studying, my "Radiohead" station for mellowing out and my "MGMT" station for rocking out. Over the past couple of months I've been actively tweaking the songs on each station via the basic 'thumbs up/down' functionality and now I finally have them in a good place where I don't have to 'thumbs down' too many songs.
I like the simple 'thumbs up/down' feature of Pandora, but at the same time I wish they had an advanced user mode for filtering songs. Sometimes I like a song but don't love it enough to give it a 'thumbs up'. Sometimes I really dislike a particular song from an artist I like but don't want to give it a 'thumbs down' because I'm afraid it might negatively impact the other songs from that artist. Sometimes I like an artist's older material but not their newer material, sometimes it’s the other way around. In each of those cases I feel that the basic 'thumbs up/down' feature just isn't enough. I wouldn't mind a 1-5 scale for ranking songs, or maybe an advanced filter to block out certain albums & songs from an artist. My geeky side actually just wants direct access to the Pandora algorithm, but I know that would probably be way too overwhelming for everyday use. Still, I wouldn't mind a 'smarter' Pandora. I might even be willing to pay extra for such features.
Random tidbits:
- MGMT Radio: I thought I liked Modest Mouse, but it turns out I don't. I've had to give a 'thumbs down' to a bunch of their songs lately.
- Damien Rice Radio: I really don't like Jack Johnson. I'm sorry, but all of his songs sound alike to me, and I really don't care for them. Pandora fed me a lot of Jack Johnson early on, but I think the algorithm has finally purged all of his songs from my station. I wish there was an "I don't like this Artist" button somewhere on Pandora for these types of situations.
- Damien Rice Radio: I was surprised to find out that I really like Ray LaMontagne. I had heard some of his songs before but I guess never in the right context. Ray's music is great for studying and relaxing.
I like the simple 'thumbs up/down' feature of Pandora, but at the same time I wish they had an advanced user mode for filtering songs. Sometimes I like a song but don't love it enough to give it a 'thumbs up'. Sometimes I really dislike a particular song from an artist I like but don't want to give it a 'thumbs down' because I'm afraid it might negatively impact the other songs from that artist. Sometimes I like an artist's older material but not their newer material, sometimes it’s the other way around. In each of those cases I feel that the basic 'thumbs up/down' feature just isn't enough. I wouldn't mind a 1-5 scale for ranking songs, or maybe an advanced filter to block out certain albums & songs from an artist. My geeky side actually just wants direct access to the Pandora algorithm, but I know that would probably be way too overwhelming for everyday use. Still, I wouldn't mind a 'smarter' Pandora. I might even be willing to pay extra for such features.
Random tidbits:
- MGMT Radio: I thought I liked Modest Mouse, but it turns out I don't. I've had to give a 'thumbs down' to a bunch of their songs lately.
- Damien Rice Radio: I really don't like Jack Johnson. I'm sorry, but all of his songs sound alike to me, and I really don't care for them. Pandora fed me a lot of Jack Johnson early on, but I think the algorithm has finally purged all of his songs from my station. I wish there was an "I don't like this Artist" button somewhere on Pandora for these types of situations.
- Damien Rice Radio: I was surprised to find out that I really like Ray LaMontagne. I had heard some of his songs before but I guess never in the right context. Ray's music is great for studying and relaxing.
