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Comment by ma2rten | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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