I haven’t used Pandora much, but when the computer we use to drive our iTunes box crashed I created an account. I really like it–and I remember trying either a precursor to it or a similar thing more than a decade ago–but I just haven’t had much occasion to use it. I particularly love the way it describes the setlist it’s creating for you based on your input.
The NYT Magazine recently did a relatively in-depth look at Pandora and how it works. It was really fascinating. For some reason I’d thought there was more collaborative filtering going on. The results about people shielding low-brow preferences from friends was pretty interesting, too. And then there was the guy who disagreed with Pandora’s suggested playlist:
He likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’ ”This anecdote almost always gets a laugh. “Pandora,” he pointed out, “doesn’t understand why that’s funny.”
