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I came back to Pandora recently and I think it has the best discovery out of any music platform. I don't pay extra to play what I want, I curate radio stations and it's been great. The only catch is you have to be diligent with your curation, because it starts to reach and while you may love song X from genre Y, the station is genre Z. If you're not careful every station will become a mix of everything.

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Former Pandora employee. The music recommendation team was amazing when I worked there, and the use of global song frequency capping across seeds helps prevent too much repetition at a user level but I agree on the genre bleed. They may have changed it but the music recommender was an ensemble model that polled 30 or so distinct models that would provide their own next song recommendation. One of the last resort recommenders used only the music genome data for the song (no collaborative filtering).

My trick is to be liberal with downvotes and excruciatingly sparing with any thumbs up.

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