Pandora Internet Radio tops terrestrial stations

[Rudy]

I had no idea Pandora was this popular...

RAIN 7/28: Pandora beats all terrestrial stations among A18-34 in top five markets

A lot of it is radio-ratings-speak, but it is interesting that in NYC, Chicago and L.A., Pandora beat all of the top terrestrial stations in those markets.

Tip: if you have a smartphone, download the Pandora app, and you can listen for free, unlimited hours, via the app. If you listen on a computer you are limited to 40 hours per week. Both have advertising, but it seems like there is less advertising on the mobile version. I may spring for the $36/year fee in a few months, especially if I get some kind of device (other than my Android-based phone) to play through my main audio system.

Tip #2: It also takes awhile to train a station the way you like it. Pandora works differently from all other streaming stations. My best station is one I originally created with Jean-Luc Ponty's music, but by giving several dozen (or maybe 100+ by now) songs a thumbs up or thumbs down, I have molded it to fit my taste. Pandora uses "music genomes" rather than genre categories to create your station. Or to put it another way, it chooses music with similar properties (similar sounds) to the music that you like.

A really good end result is that I've discovered a lot of artists I normally wouldn't have listened to...or bought. I blame Pandora for getting me hooked on Return To Forever and Al DiMeola last year, two acts I'd never really given much thought to, all programmed through my Ponty channel.

Another interesting article: The Infinite Dial also mentions their Tuesday report from Edison Research and Arbitron showing that 10% of respondents nationally had listened to Pandora in the previous week. They make a good point here:

While Pandora's personalization and the ability to skip songs leads some people to think of it as "the other," it's actually the culmination of what many radio programmers have been trying to do for the last 35 years, since listener music research took hold on a large scale: progressively eliminate more and more of the "bad songs." It's just that Pandora users have the advantage of deciding for themselves what the "bad songs" are, even if their own tastes aren't all that different from what 100 respondents typically decide.​

Putting programming control into the hands of listeners seems to be the key to their success. I'm a moderate Pandora listener myself, mainly because it is the only online radio service that bases the somewhat random selections on similarities between the sound of the songs they play. (Pandora is the outcome of the Music Genome Project, which analyzes and applies attributes to individual songs that identify their sound and mood.)

http://www.pandora.com

 

[Mr Bill]

My wife uses Pandora on her phone the way teens used tansistor radios in 60s/70s, carrying from room to room as she prepares dinner, plays games with me and the kid(s), does laundry, reads in bed, etc. In fact, the other night arouond 3AM she awakened me for some "attention" and had Tamba Trio and other soft latin jazz going. Yeah, she knows how to work it!

 

[Rudy]

I very occasionally run it through the phone speaker, but I really can't hear it that well--too bright. Although, I put it behind my bike seat and turn it up if I need something to keep me going while I'm out running errands (as I'm about to do now--we're down to one car, and I don't have it here today).

I thought I was able to tune it in via the Wii, but that's Shoutcast it can get (which is standard streaming radio), not Pandora.

 

[Harry]

I've got Pandora available on my SONY Internet-ready Blu-Ray player. Until today, Id never messed with it.

But first I went in via the computer and set up a little test station, using Herb Alpert as the starting point. It soon played some Stan Getz, Burt Bacharach, Booker T, Bread, Bebel Gilberto, and someone I'd never heard of, Kat Edmundon.

Just this afternoon, I tied the account into my SONY player and it's on now, playing Dionne Warwick's "I Say A Little Prayer", after a couple of tracks from RISE.

Cool. Definitely something to play with.

Harry

 

[Rudy]

Pandora is one of the few online services I'd consider paying for. About $36/year is not a bad deal actually. (It gives you ad-free unlimited listening hours.)

If you're not familiar with how it works, Pandora apparently grew out of a project where songs were individually analyzed for specific characteristics, including instrumentation, mood, genre (to a point), and many other attributes that could be described and voted on. By identifying these characteristics ("genomes"), it should be possible to select similar-sounding songs from a variety of artists, regardless of which musical category they might be from (rock, jazz, etc.).

So in Harry's case, he could choose Herb Alpert as a starting point, and Pandora will then play music that has enough similar characteristics to Herb's music that, theoretically, he should like.

Thing is, sometimes you don't like what is played. This is where Pandora's unique feature comes into play: you can give a thumbs up to songs that are spot-on what you want to hear, that you definitely would like to hear again. You can temporarily mute a song (for a month), or you can give it a thumbs down to tell it to never play that song again on your custom channel. (If you give a thumbs down to an artist a certain number of times, also, it will skip that artist completely in the future.) I have found that it does take a lot of votes in either direction to mold the station the way you'd like (my favorite channel probably has several dozen votes both ways), but it is well worth it.

In my case, I used Jean-Luc Ponty as a starting point for what has become my most-used channel. His earlier albums were more like a jazz fusion/prog rock type of mix. Being French, there are also a few European characteristics to his songs at times. With his Individual Choice album, he made a big change and created a handful of songs using mainly synthesizers (with no band) as accompaniment. Tchokola was an all-out African-themed album, and his subsequent albums always had some of that element to the music.

So, Ponty is not as stylistically varied as Herb Alpert (who's been all over the musical map, somtimes with each album), but there are a few variations to his music over time. On my station, of course, I get a good helping of 1970s jazz fusion in addition to Ponty's classic tracks. At one point it drifted over to playing synthesizer/ambient type of music, thanks to Ponty's Individual Choice and Open Mind albums, and I discovered a couple of artists making similar music there as well (Keito, and Thierry David). There are also out-and-out jazz violinists (and bands featuring electric violin) that appear in the channel as well: Didier Lockwood, Noel Pointer, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and others. But, they do not dominate...you do not get the impression you have created a 100% jazz violin channel.

Pat Metheny is somewhat on the fringe of jazz fusion on a few of his recordings, but some slipped into my playlist and I gave them all a thumbs-up. Soon it was also picking up other guitar artists, such as Al Di Meola (which also came due to my giving a thumbs-up to Return To Forever, of which Di Meola was a member). I gave a thumbs up to anything different it played that I liked, and I voted off a few stinkers. A few ECM recordings slipped into the mix also (based on Metheny's early ECM recordings), and I ended up liking those also.

It took awhile, but the station plays a really nice balance of music now that I like. And I have discovered a lot of artists that I had never heard of before, or had never listened to.

I know some users have dabbled in Pandora for a couple of days, and claimed they didn't like the mix that end up being played. Pandora is not for the impatient: use the paid version of Last.FM if that is your thing. Pandora takes some time, and it does not follow genre guidelines. But if the music is similar in characteristics to what you've chosen as the basis for your custom channel, and you train it, you will end up with something unique that fits your musical taste.

 

[Mike Blakesley]

I've never tried it, but I don't know if I'd like it. My music taste varies wildly from moment to moment. I like to put my Ipod on shuffle, so I'll hear Santana followed by Herb Alpert followed by Fleetwood Mac, Alan Parsons, the Buggles, Pink Floyd, Lani Hall, Burt Bacharach, Cheap Trick, the Cars, etc etc.

I'll probably hook up to Pandora in the event that we ever discontinue our Sirius XM satellite radio service. (We're an XM dealer so we get a free account.)

 

[Rudy]

I use it depending on my mood. I'm a "shuffler" also...the Zune has dozens of playlists loaded on it, some of which were designed to play in shuffle mode. (The largest is 1000+ songs at about 94 hours. ) Other times, I want to hear a few of an artist's albums in order, so I'll play that way. If I want to mix things up and maybe hear something different, I'll pick one of my Pandora stations.

XM is long gone here...after Sirius destroyed all of my favorite channels, I quit paying. Now I have four radios I don't know what to do with, one of which is a battery-powered portable...

 

[Harry]

If I'm reading the website correctly, it looks like you can create multiple 'radio stations', each based on its own theme, then use some kind of mix function to jumble them together.

And if such a thing were to work properly, you could be in say a light jazz mood, but would also welcome pop instrumentals. Or you could be in a rock'n'roll mood, but want some lighter tunes to balance it out. Does this work?

Harry

 

[Rudy]

If I'm reading the website correctly, it looks like you can create multiple 'radio stations', each based on its own theme, then use some kind of mix function to jumble them together.

And if such a thing were to work properly, you could be in say a light jazz mood, but would also welcome pop instrumentals. Or you could be in a rock'n'roll mood, but want some lighter tunes to balance it out. Does this work?

Harry

I can vouch for the multiple stations--I have at least a dozen. But I've never tried mixing up channels. I think it would be difficult for me to listen to some of my stations mingled together. Something like atmospheric ECM jazz doesn't mix well with Chic's "Le Freak", Rudy's opera favroites, or Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train." That is something I'll have to experiment with though.

Kidding on the opera, BTW.

I didn't mention that you can further fine-tune your station by adding another artist to it. IOW, if I picked jazz guitar, artists like Pat Metheny, George Benson, Al DiMeola and Ralph Towner are not exactly in the same spheres of music, but I could add the latter three to a Metheny channel to broaden the mix a bit.

I did attempt an A&M channel, but ended up not liking the picks it made for me. I may attempt to add some additional A&M artists and see if I can shape it more.

One unanswered question, too: I know you can share your station, but I don't know if it just shares the name (IOW, if I shared my Pat Metheny channel, would it start off for you as only Pat Metheny-based), or if it shares all of my customized picks. I would hope the latter. When a station is fine-tuned with your picks, it's really a treat to listen to. Especially when it's a mix of familiar tracks and unfamiliar that sound similar, which really helps me discover new artists to listen to.

 

[Harry]

I added a second station by using "Carpenters" as the model. That one gives me lots of softer rock from the '70s like England Dan 7 John Ford Coley, Seals & Crofts, Bread, etc. I used the "quick mix" option today and it did mix up the two stations with some B.J.Thomas, Bebel Gilberto and Astrud Gilberto thrown into the above mix.

When I listen on the computer, I get a commercial every three songs or so. But so far, I haven't hit any commercials on the Sony Blu-Ray player grabbing it off of my wireless internet.

Harry

 

[Rudy]

That's interesting about the Sony player. My mobile version gets ads, but nowhere near as often as the computer player. Maybe one or two ads per hour at most...? I haven't really paid attention, so it must not be that intrusive.

What might be interesting is to start a Carpenters station, then add Rumer, Sade, Bebel Gilberto and Diana Krall to that station. The common point is that they all sing in lower registers, but musically they are in different areas.

I can share a link to my Jean-Luc Ponty station, but I have no idea if it reflects my custom choices or not. The link is here: http://t.co/fyH4yOq .

 

[Rudy]

BTW, someone makes a media player that is like having the internet portion of a Sony Blu-Ray player, without the disc player portion. That would work for me. Can't afford the Blu-Ray player I'm eventually going to get (Oppo BDP-83, if I recall the model # correctly). Rumor has it the SACD section even beats the Sony ES "5400" that all the audiophiles are raving about.

 

[Michael Hagerty]

My tastes are so broad I confuse the heck out of Pandora. What comes closest to working is to create fairly narrow channels and then, when I'm in the mood for variety, to tell Pandora to shuffle them. It takes time and patience, though. I have 18 channels.

 

[Rudy]

Yes, it does take a lot of training time to get Pandora to play what you want. That's why I have maybe just a couple of stations I like that are really fine-tuned, and a couple dozen others that are sloppy.

I do like to shuffle, but only within styles. In that case I tend to use my 120GB Zune. My playlists are either artist compilations, stylistic compilations, or my monster playlist with 1000+ pop/rock/R&B/funk songs in it, which takes almost three days straight to play through.

On Pandora, I was trying to train a station to play mostly the music and/or production of Nile Rodgers (and Bernard Edwards). Very difficult. If I can ever crack that one I'd be happy, but Rodgers has hopped styles himself, so his sound is difficult to nail down in later years.