Pandora Is Said to Have Held Talks About Selling Itself | Hacker News Reader

Pandora Is Said to Have Held Talks About Selling Itself

nytimes.com

79 pointsguiseroom60 comments

I pay for Pandora b/c I get to listen to radio without ads and talk show hosts. I don't want to worry about what songs to play. Select a station and go.

"Pandora to post $1.2 billion in revenue for the year, an increase of 27 percent from 2014, the company’s slowest annual growth ever." ... It's cases like this where I wish it wasn't a public company and instead was run by someone who wanted to keep making the best music streaming app/website in town.

I paid for pandora for a period. But now it wants to play the same songs all the time.

Moved to spotify. I can listen to an available playlist or to every album from an artist one at a time or make my own playlist and store it for offline use. Seems more natural and wide open.

I had (and still do in the vehicle) XM radio, which basically solves your use case. Radio with no adverts. Some stations do have hosts, but it's not a talk show.

Honestly it has always wanted to play the same songs very often. I used to easily reach 40 hours of play per month on the free tier (back when 40 hours was the max).

Give it enough time and you wind up just hearing the same music. Sometimes I'd start a station with a very different style/genre and it'd still happen where they'd both cross as well. Too much repetition.

Yeah, I think a lot of people are moving to Spotify. I myself never paid for either but have use both (using someone else's account on Spotify).

Being able to play offline + any song/album + similar artist play mode makes Spotify hands down the better service.

I think Pandora used to have something special with their Music Genome Project recommendation system but I don't think they really rely on it as much anymore as it now seems based off of the likes and other activity other online radio recommendation systems use.

I wish some one would do a open data version of the Music Genome Project that you could hook up to a personal playlist.

I used pandora but never paid for it, was a decent way to find other artists. I was paying for Spotify but I couldn't get "everything" now I pay for Google All Music Access, which I prefer because I get "everything" and I listen to artists I wouldn't expect to find on 'GAMA' (Google All Music Access) due to the nature of their music. I never cared too much for "stations" but I know when I want to discover similar artists, GAMA let's me do the same. My only complaint about GAMA is the long name, which is not really a complaint.

1. New company comes in with VC funding

2. Uses funding to operate at a loss and undercut and outperform existing players

3. Growth slows because there are only a couple billion internet users out there. Raises prices or decreases value to try to find a profit.

4. See step 1

It's hard to see this as an efficient method for finding the best product in a free market.

Repeat 1-4 enough times and you have yourself a bubble.

I did similar, but instead of Spotify, after a trial period with Google Play Music decided to keep it. Much happier with the stations and ability to play some full albums I'm interested in. Cancelled the digital portion of Sirius XM to help justify the cost. Pandora was good for a long period of time, but now I hardly ever listen to it.

Were you using the "I'm tired of this song" feature? It snoozes songs for 30 days and forces the algorithm to pick new songs. If you're not giving the station enough input of course it will stagnate.

If it plays the same songs, you need to remove your Thumbs Ups and add them as Song Seeds. Too many Thumbs Downs are also a problem. However I think their recommendation engine has slowly declined over the years (either that or I already discovered all the recommendations relevant to my favorites).

Have you actually tried any other music services though? Deezer for example is MUCH higher quality (noticeable even on cheap earbuds or car stereos) vs pandora and has tons of 'Mix' stations that are genre based, or any artist you choose can have a 'mix' station that's very similar to how Pandora works. I'm not saying Pandora is bad, but I've used a lot of services and I would put it far from the top. The only reason it's so popular in my opinion is because they've been able to exploit the free radio loophole for so long. Now that the rules have changed we're going to see a consolidation in the music streaming industry over the next few years; the only unknown is how quickly.

Have you listened to the paid subscription high quality streams from pandora?

Until that person decides they are sick of footing the bills for a company that isn't profitable...

It would be great if Netflix bought pandora, I can see Netflix doing really great things with the underlying tech and expanding on the general idea and service of pandora. Also the pandora recommendation engine could be leveraged to provide improved Netflix recommendations.

Pandora's algorithm is specific to music and it requires musicians to hand label each song.

Sure it's specific to music but the thought technology and ideology around it could be exported to other things. The hand labeling sucks though.

That's because algorithms can't pick up the nuances of what distinguishes, say, Noise Rock and Noise Rock/Shoegaze. You need humans who understand these things.

Back in the day, Pandora showed you the attributes that they had tagged each song with (stuff like "down-tempo funky grooves", "offbeat emphasis", "prominent female vocalist"). I always wished there was some way to create a station based on an intersection of attributes, rather than a union, when you add multiple seeds to a station.

You can do this. In the song you like, click on a tag to create the station. Then under the station preferences you can add variety, such as an artist, genre or another tag.

Not quite what he's looking for. You can add more variety to make a station of music that includes x OR y OR z, but you can't make a station that plays songs with x AND y AND z.

I've run into this as well. You try to make a station that plays piano rock, and Pandora goes "Hey, here's a song that fits! It has: 1) mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, 2) major key tonality, and 3) mellow rock instrumentation." It won't care that every song you've added to the station was tagged with acoustic rhythm piano, all tags are equal to the matching algorithm.

I had an ongoing email dialogue with the Pandora CTO about this feature. Soon after Pandora's launch he said the future was coming soon but several years later he said that the way they had set up their database made it impractical for them to actually implement this feature.

Maybe could be used they hand labeled each movie? Seems easier to do as a whole.

I read the parent comment as suggesting that Pandora's accumulated data on music preferences could help improve movie recommendations.

That's probably not relevant to notion of a business deal though.

I don't think they continued doing this. It seems like they bootstrapped this way, but last time I used it (a few years ago) it was recommending the same artist 's work in two vastly different styles.

The genome is still in use, and many professional musicians are happily employed as curators for it.

It would be so depressing if Pandora's incredible music trait database went down the acquisition drain. I would pay good money for a service that let me search for songs by sets of traits. ("Give me some songs in minor, with technically impressive solos, with haunting female vocals, without any drums.")

Can't we just get Rdio back? Please. :-(

It's a shame Rdio died, it's UI/UX was far superior to Spotify. Navigating Spotify is like have a razor blade poking out of your mouse.

How are you struggling to navigate with Spotify? I think the Spotify usability is great. But I have been using it since it first came out and so any "quirks" I'm possibly just used to. Still, I find it easy to use.

If you think Spotify is bad, have you tried Apple Music? Jesus, that is a stinking pile of shit. It's awful and exactly what stopped me from using it beyond two weeks into the trial.

Google Play Music is somewhere between the two but I find absolutely no problem with Spotify's UI/UX. That said, I never used Rdio so don't have that to compare it with.

I'm a former Rdio user who's migrated to Spotify. It's clearly better in some ways but I struggle with trying to understand some of the decisions the team has made.

Just off the top of my head...

- The queue is fundamentally broken and useless. They really should rename it to "play stack... kinda".

- Clicking on an album to play it puts you in a subtly different state than playing the first song in that album. I'll let you figure that one out.

- The activity stream is one-way. there is no way to reply to a post. You are just shouting out into the darkness.

- Gestures don't work on osx, you have to find and click the tiny back button to go back.

- It's track/playlist based but playlists have a 10k song limit, so there is no way to keep a large collection of 'favorite' albums.

- From a list view there is no way to tell if an item is a single or a full album without clicking into it's detail view.

- No way to change your avatar. It's tied to whatever your facebook avatar is.

- Playlists have no description or image - unless you are a music label partner.

And dozens of features and niceties that Rdio had that you probably can't appreciate until you used them.

There's a slack community (Rdio Lovers) with hundreds of people that can't find a service that is anywhere near as polished and complete as Rdio was.

The spotify queue system is just awful. Various examples:

- I can't just put music in the queue to play and then stop with an empty queue. There always has to be something in "next tracks", either an album or a playlist.

- I can't add a playlist to the queue.

- The queue is not synced between all my devices (spotify desktop on osx, spotify beta on linux, play.spotify.com, android app, mopidy-spotify for home stereo). With Rdio there was just one queue and everything played it. Spotify Connect is trying to fix this but it's not supported everywhere yet.

- Sometimes things I've deleted from my queue magically reappear.

- Restarting the app (on osx) makes me lose the first song from my queue (since it jumps back to "next tracks").

oh geez you just reminded me of a huge wtf on the mobile app. Whenever you get to an album or playlist, the gigantic green button says "Shuffle Play" and there is no way to change that.

Why is the default play button "shuffle" when I do not have shuffle turned on?

Yes! The first time I used the mobile app I literally spent five minutes trying to figure out how to play an album in the correct order, until I eventually realized I could hit play on the first song. Definitely a huge wtf. Does anyone at Spotify actually listen to whole albums?

It's so maddening I'm considering switching to Google Music, but I'm not sure it's much better. Their mobile app has also really annoyed me in the past.

I am purely just curious, but could you provide some specific examples of poor UI/UX in Sportify?

It would be a bummer if Pandora is sold and the service changed appreciably. One would hope you could somehow get your ratings out of the system.

Not the best, but https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/12202/is-there-a....

Additionally, Pandora does have an API that allows you to pull your favorites. https://6xq.net/pandora-apidoc/json/

Right after buying Rdio? Grr.

I hear ya, that pisses me off.

yeah totally bogus!!! rdio > pandora in my opinion... horseradish!

ya they kill of what was a VERY nice place to go for music. Better quality, better UI/UX even more so the spotify, (see others comments in this HN thread for some examples), Now I am back to being stuck with spotify since getting the same music over and over again is really bad. in both services. (I have not used Google Play Music enough to really comment on it) So sad we had to lose a great service to one that was going down hill and did not even use the great service to bolster itself.

If Netflix buys Pandora, the resulting entity will be an Internet Media power house.

I think it would be interesting to have google buy it. Pandora's strength seems to come from their massive dataset of song traits. Google could probably make good use of that data. They'd probably feed it into a neural net and see if they can teach a machine to detect those traits, if they haven't already.

One of my dreams is to actually see how all of that works. I'm not in it for the music - I just really am a music nerd and would love to know how all that stuff is stored, pulled together, and queried.

For Pandora, they use a vector distance algorithm (with some other nudges to keep it from being repetitive, I'm sure). They break down a song on a scale of 1-5 across hundreds of "genes" and then pick songs based on how similar or "close" they are in the multidimensional space.

Heh, the fully automated driving experience will be wonderful when the robots are driving us around and then music streamedninto the car is all robotically recommended to us.

now we just need fully automated robotic restaurants and we truly will be taken care of by technology.

and fully robotic farmers

and fully robotic hole diggers, and a robot to mush together our squishy parts occasionally

:-) I like the mushy parts bit. Thanks for the chuckle.

I already prefer auto-playlists from Google Play Music to Pandora's. I think the acquisition of Songza probably helped.

I agree, Songza was a big win for them. I was really impressed at how quick they got their features moved into Google Music, not super typical for Google.

Ugh, no. I had to abandon Songza when Google bought them, don't make me abandon Pandora too.

Google wouldn't do anything interesting like that if they bought Pandora. The first thing they would do would be to require a Google+ account to use it, which everyone would hate. Then they would keep changing the UI and the name over and over until no one knew it even existed or what it was called anymore, and then finally they would shut it down.

Google would probably integrate it with their existing play music offering. And I think they've backed off on pushing the Google+ logins due to the backlash.

You could also do was last.fm did and just base it on what songs other users were listening to. I found a lot of great music through last.fm and was never impressed by Pandora. I use neither now.

I really hope they give some way to export out my ratings. Is it possible to do that right now?

Spotify, with help from The Echo Nest acquisition, replicated Pandora a while ago.

Pandora is said to be a very beautiful and dangerous woman. I am sorry to hear she is selling herself. There's still hope, though...

Is there a venture backed company that hasn't had this kind of conversation?

I don't see how you could raise money without having this kind of conversation.

They are public though

Pandora is public.

Off-topic: http://ridetheclown.com/wp/saver2/

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