ray's big blog

Pandora.com is a very cool idea. It lets you build your own radio station, using a TiVo-style thumbs-up, thumbs-down controller for each song. Where it differs from, say, last.fm, is that it doesn't use other users or sales as the basis for similar music. Instead, they use a cadre of professional musicians who describe each song. It uses these descriptions to come up with a play list. It is fascinating and frustrating at the same time.

Fascinating because:

• It really does learn fast. Within 5-6 songs it starts to play stuff that doesn't offend your ears. By the time you get to number 8 it feels like it might be reading your mind, giving you stuff that you really like.
  
• It plays non-RIAA (independent) labels mixed in with the regular RIAA artists that you are accustomed to. This is great because you will hear stuff that you probably wouldn't hear unless you listen to college radio or actively seek out independent music on the internet.

Frustrating because:

• As with all things regarding intellectual property, there are ludicrous limits on what their licensing allows them to do. For instance, you can only rank songs as "thumbs-up", or "thumbs-down", but sometimes you have a song that doesn't really deserve the "thumbs-down" (which banishes it from your playlist forever), so you just want to skip it. You can only do this so many times per hour. Yes, really. What is worse, after you hit this limit, the "thumbs-down" button no longer skips the song! Apparently the record companies think that it is more advantageous for them if you are forced to listen to stuff you don't actually want to hear. Huh? Wouldn't they want me to move along and find a track that I love enough to run out and buy? Whatever, the music industry doesn't seem to be run by the smartest of people.
  
• They have a limited selection of music, it seems. I keep hearing the same songs again and again even though I haven't given them the "thumbs-up". This is distressing because I really don't dislike the songs but I'm going to have to thumbs-down them pretty soon so that they stop coming up! But won't that screw up their matching system? I guess I'll find out...
  
• My playlists ("radio stations") are starting to sound the same. I mean, this makes sense on one level: I'm training the thing to know what I like, so you'd expect some convergence. On another level, though, my "seeds" are very, very different. Still, I'm afraid that all I'll have on here after it's "tuned" is Smashing Pumpkins and the Pixies - albums that I already have. I went out and purchased or downloaded the other songs that I had given the ol' thumbs-up, so I don't really need them in heavy rotation either. Maybe if they had a "I've Bought It" checkbox that would put songs in a lighter rotation...
  
• They need a "clear rating" button. Sometimes you make a song thumbs-up and then later regret it. Right now I can't find a way to un-thumbs-up a song. Similarly, the same kind of thing could happen with thumbs-down - though it hasn't happened to me yet.

Now if there were a way to get this into your car/walkman... it would be cool to have an iPod Shuffle-like device with only 4 buttons on it: play, thumbs-up, thumbs-down, and skip.

So far, I've signed up for the 3 months for $12 deal. My wife and I are both hooked on it right now, but I could see the novelty wearing off. In fact, I think Abby might already be done with it.

update 11-Oct-2005:
Some more interesting observations:

• You can get around the whole "you have skipped too many songs" issue by simply changing to another station. The counter is reset for the station that you go to, and by the time you have exceeded the limit for this new station, you can switch back to the original station and keep skipping. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
• Seeding an independent artist (non-RIAA) seems to provide entirely different behavior than seeding an RIAA artist. Could this be a difference in licensing? When I used the Pixies or the Raveonettes as my seed, I hardly ever heard another song by the Pixies or the Raveonettes. The same thing happened when we seeded with Shakira, Nelly, Tyrese, Elton John, and the Bee Gees for my wife - hardly any songs by the artist we seed with. Enter Mirah. I seed with Mirah (from the K Records label, which is independent) and I get a torrent of other Mirah songs. Well, maybe not a torrent, but approximately 1 out of every 6 songs. Interesting...

update 16-Oct-2005:
Saving the Streams!

Yes, I've figured out how to save the streamed music! Turns out that the music is just regular old mp3s that are loaded onto your hard drive. On my Mac using Safari, the path is in /private/tmp, which is the standard temporary directory. Safari throws each downloaded song in there with a filename beginning with "WebKitPlugInStream". Some of these files are just small files containing song info, and others are much larger and contain the mp3. All you have to do is take the big files, make a copy of them, and add ".mp3" to the end. Ta-da! Now you have an mp3 file that you can open in iTunes, or whatever.

It seems like the Pandora player always queues one song ahead, so if you want to keep the currently playing song, just use the 2nd most recent big file. The most recent file will play next.

Obviously, this arrangement will be different if you are using Firefox, but I imagine it will be pretty much the same thing - only the file names and the location will be different. I wonder how long this will last before they get wise? Someone could easily write a GUI app that would do this automatically.