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?

it's ending

my vampire weekend station has repeated at least three separate songs since the afternoon. it's not like i've had it on the whole time either; maybe three hours total. this is where i start to check out. i had been thinking the playlists were deeper, but it still looks like the equivalent of loading up a 10-disc changer and hitting random. not that you'd hear the same song from the same album twice if you did that.

while the shallow playlists seem ridiculous in the internet era (cf last.fm, where you will be slowly barraged with new artists and hear multiple alternate versions of familiar songs), what if there was a service that would let you pick any five discs and hit random? a virtual cd-changer. a niche, throwback, but controllable product. it's sad that a company that pays teams of music experts to tear apart tracks in their minute elements is basically giving us the same thing--but where we pick one artist and hope the other five we'll hear endlessly are worth it.

wilco!

it's a proud moment for the vampire weekend station.

too bad they still show up all the time, and that the next song that played after that one turned out to be death cab, which proves that i might have made the wrong list.

so far today:

vampire weekend x4
cake x2
modest mouse x2
ok go x1
wilco x2
the shins x1
the killers x2
the kooks x1
the strokes x2
death cab x2
cwk x1
the eels x1
andrew bird x1
arctic monkeys x1
and suddenly...johnny cash x1

that's 16 of 24 songs from seven artists, with one big surprise - cash - that is impressive but does not fit the mood. the killers popped up twice after initially surprising me with their appearance, so perhaps i just haven't been watching the track logs carefully.