alt Hacker NewsPandora was always the best at figuring out what I wanted to hear; long before AI was a thing, and it's still better.
However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.
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Spotify fucking sucks - it seems to try to herd everyone into one of a few genres. For me, last.fm was the best. Currently I'm reasonably happy with Soundcloud.
The algorithm was the product, the licensing model was its failure. Proof you can get goodwill via an algorithm if you actually make it for the user rather than treating them like fodder for your ad network. Maybe someday in my lifetime we can actually achieve the dreams our platforms promised but rugpulled to make the worst people on the planet billionaires
> However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.
I have a bunch of different Pandora channels with different themes.
Pandora's skip limit is per-channel. If you run out of skips on one channel, and give up on it and start playing another channel, you get the full complement of skips back. You can go for quite a while if you have several channels.
In a development that is probably not related, but nevertheless feels like it is, Pandora tries hard to get you to collapse your channels, playing songs on one of them that don't fit at all but that you've thumbed up on another channel.
(Another obvious pattern is that if you haven't signed in to Pandora in a while, all of your channels will heavily feature songs that you've already thumbed up. They start playing new potential "discoveries" only after working through a "welcome back" backlog.)
We used to have a running joke in the office that all pandora stations eventually converge on Maroon 5. You could pick a death metal station and eventually it would somehow work its way to a paid 2 play popular band track. It was still pretty good though.
Pandora had the problem that I dislike a song and then it's like "how about mix #17 of the same song?", "how about mix #7 of the same song", "how about mix #3" of the same song?"
yes. You are (or at least, were. c. late 2000's) Pandora's customer. They want to maximize engagement either to serve ads or to justify a subscription.
You are Spotify's product. They get money making record labels happy. User preference is secondary to this goal.
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No matter my goal, I found that my Pandora stations always converged on the same endpoint. I always ended up with Ellie Goulding and Dubstep, despite not really liking either of those. It rather killed my interest in the service.
The one exception was an experiment where I gave every single song a thumbs up. It converged on comedy rock (Weird Al, Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, etc).