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Rant – Pandora Pisses Me Off!
By Werner Mueck | September 16, 2009
I discovered Pandora after getting an internet upgrade. I was looking for some sort of online radio and the concept of Pandora really appealed to me. When you sign up (free) you can create your own radio station. You do this by adding artists or songs to your station. The Pandora site adds songs similar to your choices to your station.
While you listen to your station, you have the option to skip a song, give it a thumbs up (adds it to your station and plays it more often), or thumbs down (which removes the song from your station permanently and skips the song). If you listen to your station frequently and use these options, pretty soon your station will begin to shape up into what you want it to sound like.
Now, there are a few restrictions. I don’t think you can request a song specifically and hear it. It is probably added to your station but will come up randomly like everything else. You also only get a certain amount of skips and thumbs down per hour. Now the way past this is to create (or flip to) another station. I have several stations, 3 pop/rock, 3 pop/rock oldies, 2 country, 2 country oldies, and one specifically for Beatles type music.
Ok, now that the description of the service is out of the way, I’m going to start bitching about it. Things have changed with Pandora since I started making my stations there.
As of whenever they changed things, your skips per hour count toward all your stations. You can still switch to another station but if it’s playing a song you don’t like and you used up your skips for that hour, you either have to sit through the song or keep flipping stations. Also, I’ve noticed that the skip allowance doesn’t always reset after an hour. Here’s the best part. It seems as if the program is throwing random crap into the station to cause you to use up your skips quicker. If it were one song it would be bad enough but you’ll get a string of songs that have absolutely nothing to do with your station (I was listening to my Beatles station last night and it played the Dixie Chicks, who I hate on my best day).
They’ve also started to play unskippable ad spots. That doesn’t annoy me too much but it seems like the commercials are popping up more and more frequently. I almost hit a 40 hour a month listening limit last month that I didn’t know about. I guess you have to pay for the service once you hit the limit. It’ll also stop the music between songs if you become “inactive”. I like to put the music on while I’m doing other computer work and sometimes there’s a long string of music I’ve approved. It’ll stop and wait until I push a button to confirm I haven’t died. I guess that’s a good thing though. Wouldn’t want to burn through my 40 hours while sitting on the toilet.
Why should all this bother me when it’s a free service. I guess it’s because I put a lot of time into molding my stations and they don’t seem to have the constraints I put on them anymore. It’s just something that has annoyed me lately.
Topics: Rants in My Pants | 1 Comment »
If this stuff wasn’t bad enough, NOW when you change channels you have to sit through a damn tv commercial…..
Posted by: Werner Mueck on September 26th, 2009 at 6:14 am