I’ve decided to branch out from my usual Internet Radio fix and experiment with Pandora. There’s been a lot of rave reviews out there, and I recall reading a Slashdot article about the data mining algorithms that go into determining your preferences (or maybe that was Last.fm). I’ll probably mess around with Last.fm to see the differences, since Pandora definitely has its highlights and drawbacks.
The interface is great since I just have to fire up a web browser and cookies automatically log me in. There’s no messing around with a software mp3 player and picking out the correct format so the player can interpret the stream. Sound quality is okay, but it seems that some tracks are better than others.
Nearly all the reviews I read said that Pandora was excellent in picking out songs they liked. I don’t entirely agree with this. In the web-based interface, you name an artist or song you like and Pandora plays music based on particular musical qualities of the artist or song. It seems that for me, when I name an artist or song in my existing mp3 archive, one of three things happens, each with about equal probability:
1. Pandora plays a song I’ve already got in my mp3 collection. Many times it isn’t even the same artist of the initial artist/song I specified, which makes it kind of weird. It would appear as though the preferences/data mining engine is almost too good, but this definitely isn’t always the case.
2. Pandora plays something that seems almost completely orthogonal to what I specified. For example, I put in Bruce Springsteen and it played something from Megadeth with lots of screaming and out of control percussion. I’m not sure how this relationship was determined, but it definitely didn’t give me what I wanted.
3. I actually hear something new that sounds similar to the artist/song I put in. In these cases, there definitely seems to be a relationship between the original song or artist I specified and what Pandora plays. This is the case I would prefer.
Pandora definitely doesn’t live up to all the hype — its preference/similarity determination seems to be either spot on or way off. Most of the time it seems to work, but I would rather hear something new than something I’ve already got in my mp3 collection (of course Pandora doesn’t know this). That’s one of the reasons I’ve been listening to Radio Paradise — they play all kinds of stuff I’ve never heard before and a wide enough variety to keep me coming back. One of the big features of Last.fm is that it can determine your preferences from your existing collection, so I may have to give that a try to see the differences. It seems that like most of these “Web 2.0″ apps, the data mining and social aggregation algorithms sort of work, but not enough to be really cool.
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