Singing the praises of Pandora One

I've brought this topic up in the past and I've tried some new services.

The wife's car has Sirius/XM and I have the web version which I can stream through my phone to my car stereo. Still not a fan of Sirius/XM as there are too many commercials and the music selection hasn't impressed me. Channel selection is difficult to remember and genre can be less than obvious with names like Lithium, Octane, and The Highway. WTF?

I switched to Pandora One and pay the $4/mo subscription which removes all the ads. Absolutely zero commercials, great reception and good song selection that rarely repeats. If I want some AC/DC I select my AC/DC station and it plays AC/DC and similar music, like Aerosmith or ZZ Top. If I want some current stuff, plug in a current artist and bam, it plays current music. I'm a fan of Pandora One. The free Pandora sucks BTW. Way to many ads. Get the paid version and get just music.

I have the paid Pandora as well. It's nice but sometimes it will just change songs right in the middle of a song. Other than that its good tunes.

I use Pandora all the time at work, home, in the car, and so on.

But I don't pay $4.00 a month I can listen to an occasional commercial. ;)

Love Pandora.

Spotify > *

I want to like spotify... but... maybe it's because I've used Pandora for so long (and I pay, $36/year), I just don't find the app easy enough to use and frankly the mobile app vs. desktop app pisses me off.

But then again, part of the "good" of using Pandora is I just set it and forget it. With Spotify, I feel it's more like trying to choose a song on a idevice. If I *knew* what I wanted to listen to I'd listen to it... I don't really know, so you choose. I just need the background noise most of the time really.

I've listened to pandora for years. Use it for homework and at work. Great radio but lately they seem to have gone down the crapper.
The algorithm: take favorite band, play every slow-ass filler song they've ever recorded, and hours of similar artists' slow sappy shit.

My morning Jacket, Dead Weather, Radiohead... lots of great normal speed music...nope, hours of slow depressing emo crap. I still listen to it, but I usually end up frustratedly maxing out the 6 skips or so within 30 minutes. They really need to work on that. Or maybe I need to redo all my stations with song seeds instead of artist seeds.

Spotify seems like a good concept, but the interface is wonky, hard to get used to and not intuitive at all.

I've always just assumed it's a form of population control when Pandora slips in to "Music to Slit your Wrists By" mode...

Are you skipping songs you don't like or thumbs downing them? That makes a big difference. Skip means "not in the mood for it" whereas TD means "don't play this drivel again". Thumbs up means "more like this"

I find that seeding stations by songs gets me better choices.

I agree that starting with a song is better. I also find that merging two stations that are good makes a great station. I just refine one with songs from the other. Also, don't hesitate to TD a bad or marginal song, even if you like the artist. That's how you avoid the crap filler. And don't TU every song that you kinda enjoy; be selective.

Fyi- Pandora is commercial free with Verizon Fios. Its in the widgets.

Listened to Christmas Jazz all day today!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by motorollow

Fyi- Pandora is commercial free with Verizon Fios. Its in the widgets.

Listened to Christmas Jazz all day today!

---

It had seemed to be commercial free no matter how you access it via Fios, and then suddenly on via the "widget"... But I have been a paying subscriber for a while now since I started using it more often away from home.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by goofygrin

Are you skipping songs you don't like or thumbs downing them? That makes a big difference. Skip means "not in the mood for it" whereas TD means "don't play this drivel again". Thumbs up means "more like this"

I find that seeding stations by songs gets me better choices.

---

Yea I thumb down with a fury, the slow emo crap still keeps rolling. You have to be careful, if you thumb down an artist twice it bans it completely from your station. I don't want to lose some of them, this might be the problem. They should have an option around this.

Excessive thuming up destroyed one of my stations since it treats every thumb up as a new song seed. Station started to lose focus, i'd have Led Zepplin followed by something like Bing Crosby, haha.

I have all this Pandora stuff figured out! You can have "free" comercial-free Pandora anywhere if you connect a Slingbox to your Verizon Fios DVR. The Slingbox would pay for itself in about 10 years! ;-)

I love Spotify. The big difference between the two is one is like radio and plays songs that it thinks you will like, the other plays songs you like. LOL.

Unfortunately, a lot of the music I like isn't in the spotify catalog, so it's no use to me. I have to stick to my iTunes library.