Pandora Knows if You Are a Republican | Hacker News Reader

Pandora Knows if You Are a Republican

online.wsj.com

19 pointsrmason45 comments

Sure. Pandora also thinks I'm Mexican, and has been playing ads to me in Spanish ever since the day I listened to a couple of awesome Flemenco guitar songs.

That's nothing in the UK yahoo seems to think I come from India and keeps showing me Indian matrimonial arranged marriage sites.

Yeah,for me it's muslim dating ads. At least they are not trying to guess your religion ;)

Hey, Google used to show me bow resin ads after I subscribed to cello-dev (about a Common Lisp library).

Christmas music botched it for me. Polluted all my stations so I left.

How does that happen? I had a couple of Christmas stations set up in Pandora and none of it 'leaked' over to any other radio station.

Same here. They've also been giving me localized ads for the Austin area when I haven't lived there in years and have only visited occasionally since.

That was happening to me, I realized it was using whatever zipcode I put in to signup in like 2002. If you change that you'll get local ads at least.

"But I only watched Will & Grace one time, one day! Wish I hadn't. 'cause TiVo now thinks I'm gay."

I accidentally burned some cycles in the world of political marketing and it is incredibly rigid.

The general approach is spend your money to get KNOWN party voters back to the polls.

EG - make sure known republicans:

(a) know you are the republican candidate

(b) get to the polls

And if you read the article Pandora is effectively leveraging a very boring, unoriginal approach to political marketing wrapped in great PR:

"Pandora's inferences start with a user's ZIP Code, supplied at registration. So if 80% of citizens in a certain county voted for President Obama in 2012, Pandora assumes that 80% of people in the ZIP Codes in that county "lean Democrat." If the county voted twice for Obama, the algorithm pegs users in those ZIP Codes as likely to be "strong Democrats."

Then there's some sprinkled in "algorithmic" work around user music preference.

Which really I bet that buyers won't care that much about as they're too afraid of missing any known voters to want to take a risk on micro-targeting.

Pandora still hasn't correctly nailed down my musical taste despite nearly 2 years of continuous usage. How are they going to guess my political party affiliations correctly?

Blue or Red isn't really a difficult decision to make. If you flip a coin you're already 50% likely to be correct. Musical taste is much much harder.

For me personally, I've completely quit using Pandora because every station I try to make ends up playing Top 40 pop music. At least Last.FM sticks to the genre I've put in, Pandora seems to try to steer me to listen to songs they want me to listen to. Really annoying when I start listening to Americana and classic country and end up with Drake several hours later.

All roads lead to Drake and Ke$ha.

Timber!

That too!

What makes Last.FM so good is they recommend music based on similar users, not similar artists. An artist I frequently use to demonstrate this difference is Hank Williams III. People who are familiar with him knows he plays both neo-traditional country and "hellbilly," so it's difficult to find similar artists.

To generate a Hank III radio station, Pandora analyzes his music, and -- based on similarities in composition and genre ("major key tonality," "traditional country influes") -- creates a station of top 40 pop country songs, which is pretty much the antithesis of Hank III's music.

Last.FM, on the other hand, analyzes the listening habits of other Hank III fans, and correctly assumes someone listening to Hank III radio will not only be a fan of outlaw and traditional country music, but also of bands like the Misfits and Black Flag.

It's also likely that the blue/red preference is a much more simple, more fundamental choice, likely tied into the "kernel" of the brain, whereas music is more of a "user space app".

It's easy especially if they know the zip code.

They can only do so with error, but I bet that a higher percentage of country music fans than rap music fans are Republican. Given racial voting patterns, "white" genres of music will tend to have more Republicans.

That's probably true, but I'll bet you can get a lot more accurate than that. Punk and folk are fairly white genres, but I'll bet they're a strong indicator you don't vote Republican.

This is way more interesting than party affiliation (which I bet is largely based on cultural affiliation, not policy preferences): "He says that people within higher-income brackets have more eclectic musical tastes than others."

I can see that possibly being true but has anyone seen studies on this? Is the correlation between income and diverse music tastes very strong?

There are probably a metric shitload of confounding variables in between.

You may enjoy the 1996 paper "Changing Highbrow Tastes: From Snob to Omnivore" http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lundyj/New%20College%20Class/...

The people who hang out here on HN probably have more complexity to their personalities than your "average Joe/Jane". We're probably the outliers to the statistical model - and my guess is that we'd all be surprised how accurate Pandora's insights are for the general public.

> The people who hang out here on HN probably have more complexity to their personalities than your "average Joe/Jane"

I think that statement is a load of crap and elitist. You're not more complex than the rest, you just gloss over their complexity since it is not in your frame of reference.

so do I!! Wow, I would likely argue quite the opposite is true, hackers are generally deficient in many other areas. Complexity comes in many forms, and just having an affinity for highly deterministic systems (computers) is likely a feature vector of diminished complexity. But very likely that's also crap.

someone else said it nicer, but herd mentality describes many who think they are special. The user of sites similar to this become painfully predictable. There are those on the extreme to one side or another, but the rest are herd animals basically typing long winded "ME TOOS"

I think if you go to any web forum you'll get people saying similar things about themselves vs. "the general public."

People do tend to think this way, but when applied to the topic that the forum is built around, this line of thinking is probably accurate.

People on HN are probably more tech-savvy than the general population. People on DefensiveCarry are probably more CCW-savvy than the general population. People on /r/Seinfeld probably tend to be some of the show's/comedian's biggest fans.

I understand and agree that the claim that we have more "complex personalities" is a little suspect, but a lot of these sorts of claims probably have something to them.

I am willing to bet they don't know my voting preferences solely from the music I listen to on a regular basis. I think the story is wrong, they must be using other data if their predictions are accurate.

Up next from WSJ's crack "Shit We Should Have Already Known About" research team: "HOLY FUCKBALLS, Your Credit Card Company Knows STUFF About You!"

Joke's on them, I listen to country and electronic... I wonder what they will make of that.

I thought this was odd, because I'm not a Republican or a Democrat. The headline of this article is a nice outline of the obnoxious presumptuousness pervasive in the marketing industry that got me to leave it.

> " Mr. Krawczyk said he believes Pandora's predictions are between 75% and 80% accurate"

This doesn't really seem noteworthy at all. I would be interested to know on a national level, percentage-wise what the average majority of each county votes.

I don't know how to word that better unfortunately, so here's an example: If we have three counties with equal population and one votes 81% republican, another 71% republican and the third 88% democrat, I would be able to determine your voting preferences by county alone with ~80% correctness. I know some states are swing states, but I think that a lot of those counties are still strong in one direction.

Anyone know where this data might exist just for kicks?

This map shows the voting percentage from the last election for the House of Representatives for each county.

http://s1131.photobucket.com/user/swolf318/media/Political%2...

Thanks! Managed to find a raw data source, added a reply to myself.

Alright, so I managed to dig up the raw data by county.[1]

I think I crunched the numbers correctly, but I wouldn't bet money on it being 100%. I just took the winning % per county and took a weighted average across the nation. I believe that should give me the desired results. The result set I used was purely presidential votes between only Obama and Romney which gave me some weird stuff like Harris, TX having a majority vote of 49.4% (also the third highest voting county, which hurt the average). Anyway, it was a fun excercise and it appears that pandora is estimated to be 25-30% more accurate than guessing on county/zip alone.

I ended up seeing 61.29% as the average "majority" in each county.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/07/us-2012...

They don't know your voting preferences, so the headline is a bit misleading. But they don't need to know them for sure; they just need to be able to guess them better than other ad providers.

I think Pandora is just going to push a bunch of potential customers away if they start delivering political ads. Most people have lost trust in both parties and don't want to hear it.

Well I just heard a Keystone pipeline ad that asked me to call a Congressman or the President or something. Guess it's already going on.

Not news. The companies that run analytics for the cable companies and movie studios know your age, race, gender, education and income level, just from the shows you watch. D vs. R is trivial to figure out.

"The Cloud" is getting creepy.

no surprise. Even adult video industry knows if you're a Republican and sells this data to the marketers in "normal" channels

Pandora thinks I'm single (I'm not).

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