Vaniver comments on Things you are supposed to like - Less Wrong

68 Post author: PhilGoetz 22 October 2011 02:04AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 23 October 2011 04:23:32PM 1 point [-]

Try Pandora? Their licenses prevent them from playing songs too frequently, but they replay songs you upvote more than songs you don't (and never play songs you downvote), as well as learning from your preferences to give you new music you might enjoy.

I have found that their selection can be somewhat limited in some subgenres, to the point where you can have upvoted or downvoted enough that it no longer has new music it thinks you'll be interested in. (So far, I've only done this with Celtic Punk, and that was made easier by my dislike of The Pogues.)

Comment author: randallsquared 01 November 2011 01:31:31PM *  0 points [-]

I like Pandora enough that I pay for it. That said, there are some issues with it:

  • a given station seems to be limited to 20-30 songs, with a very occasional other song tossed in, so if you listen to it throughout a workday, you'll have heard the same song repeatedly. This can be ideal, however, for worktime music, where repetitive enjoyability is more important that novelty.
  • Pandora doesn't have some artists, especially (I think) those not completely representable with ASCII, like Alizée.
  • If you upvote everything you like, and downvote things you don't like regularly, and if your tastes are quite broad across genres, it's easy for stations to drift from their seed song or artist so far that it mostly plays things not really representative of the name you gave it originally. Additionally, multiple stations can converge so that they mostly play the same songs, except for the original song you started each station with, which are quite different.
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