pandora emailed me

i apparently linked my pandora account to an email i never check, but they wrote me several days ago to remind me that i'd run out or nearly run out of listening hours for the month. i suppose i might as well burn through the rest of it tomorrow.

as it turned out, my old stations are still annoying shallow in playlist size. the spoon station may be less annoying; perhaps it's got something to do with the fact that they have so many albums. i wonder though whether all the music on that station will get old too. it was weird going back to the decemberists station and having it play the exact same tarkio song over again. that's been the worst thing about them, and one that seemed to have improved--they play one 'related' song and then nothing else by that artist. this is clearly still a company that's overly in love with their technology.

still a mess

i had my decemberists station fired up on pandora. here are the artists for the last six songs it's played:

decemberists
decemberists
death cab
tarkio
neutral milk hotel
decemberists

see the problem here? tarkio is colin meloy's old band, so four of these six songs featured his admirable voice. that's too much, though, for a service that supposedly provides a radio-like functionality exposing listeners to a variety of artists. pandora's supposed genius comes from paying a bunch of people to minutely examine the musical features of songs. this data is used to create stations with musical similarities to the artist or song you've identified as a favorite. it's ridiculous to do all that work and ignore something as simple as the fact that you're playing songs with the same guy's voice over and over.

still not going back

pandora experiment continues with surprising results, as the station i created based on spoon has seemed to contain more different songs and artists than anything i've seen on the site before. i am pretty sure i'd go crazy quickly if i went back to my shins or vampire weekend stations, but this is promising thus far.

cold

it got warm enough that eating ice cream sounded like a good idea. why is it that there's a huge competitor to coldstone called marble slab? it seems like that should be a joke and yet it is not.

saved?

Pandora's on a little firmer ground these days after I created a new station and surprisingly found it did not simply link back to most of the music from my previous stations. I was even surprised the other day when it played a song from an Om Records compilation, because it's been forever since I've spent a lot of time with that portion of my collection. The strange thing is that the new station is built around Spoon, and they get played all the time on my Vampire Weekend station. The Vampire Weekend station in turn seems to play most of what I used to hear on my Shins station, which is why it got old fast. At least I have a new (still tiny?) playlist to get sick of.

So the race is on again...will I tire of Pandora this month before I run out of free listening time?