So… I’ve been messing around trying to get Pandora working well for me. I set up a channel and added several song / artist seeds. Then I started thumbing up or down the songs that Pandora suggested for me.
The problem is that now it seems that the only music Pandora plays for me is the stuff I thumbed up, with very little in the way of new music.
What am I doing wrong? Should I un-thumb some of the stuff I previously thumbed up? Add more artist or song seeds? Clear everything out and start over?
Or is Pandora just confused by my admittedly picky listening preferences?
If anyone has suggestions, let me know. And here’s a link to the channel in question, if you’re curious.
Pandora is excessively picky when it comes to thumbs-down. When you rate a song downward, it will also rate the entire BAND down as well. And if you downrate enough songs that share the same particular characteristics, those weird identifiers that the service uses to filter your channel, then it will keep ANY other song from playing that happens to share those same characteristics.
My advice is to use the “heard this song too bloody much and it’s making my ears bleed” button that keeps that song from playing for the next thirty days rather than a straight thumbs-down in order to keep your station flowing well. I found this out the hard way when I was trying to perfect my German goth station.
With Pandora, perfection is not a goal, but an impossibility. For every song you think is perfect for you, there will be a couple of dozen songs that you think are absolute crap. Simply aim for “good enough”.
Oh. And here’s the link to the aforementioned channel:
This Is Not A Rickroll
Thanks OC! I’ll give it a try. 🙂