Why Pandora.com Sucks

I'm a R&B kind of girl, and grant it, I like my occasional slow jam... HOWEVER, when 90% are slow this creates a problem. I want to enjoy Pandora when I'm cleaning or doing something that requires something upbeat in the background. Instead I get one slow song after an other. I'm playing it now and the first song was fast and the last four have been slow. REALLY, PANDORA!?? I'm trying to give Slacker Radio a shot, but I'm not crazy about the dark pages and the nagivation. I guess it's time to fire up my iTunes and create some custom playlist. OH.. and speaking of forgetting the station you're on. One day I was playing an Usher station, so why was it that I was getting SLOW songs from the 60s and 70s. Something has to give!

So basically you are mad because:

Reason #1: You don't understand how the service works.
Reason #2: You hate music.
Reason #3: And you have a shitty computer.

When I listen to Pandora, it's supposed to play me Beatlesque music. I have filled my preferred artists list with all kinds of classic-rock-type acts not too far away from The Beatles, sound-wise or historically speaking. So what do I get? Well, they always lure me in with an ACTUAL Beatles song when I first log on. From that point on, they move further and further away from what I'd like to hear. I barely hear any of my preferred artists, and before you know it, I'm listening to CLASSICAL MUSIC! I do NOT have Chopin or Mahler on my list of favorite artists. I should not be hearing that music. Frankly, just listening to a typical terrestrial classic rock station is a better 'personalized' experience for me than Pandora. I can't figure out why they're so popular. Jango and Slacker are much better. Try them for yourselves if you don't believe me.

- Wazir Nurani

As much as I was fond of Pandora initially, when the song skip limit was introduced sometime last year the service began to seem much more tedious than useful. I can never seem to find songs which I am fond of being played in MY "radio stations." Instead, I am forcibly exposed to unrelated and distasteful music.

In my opinion, Pandora's success does not lie in simply providing the consumer with access to new music, rather it relies on a voluminous and solid foundation of music that the user can relate to which is then a short reach to unknown musical content. Pandora's attempt to force its musical content on the user without access to the consumer's musical favorites is its downfall.

I too, have had a lot of trouble with Pandora. I typed in Pandora sucks and came across this blog.
I think that the OP had some good points, but it never crashed for me, either. Its just that Pandora does not seem to have that big of a selection of music. Granted, that I only listen to one or two genres, but Pandora consistently replays songs, so much so that I can't get away from two or three artists, over a couple of hours. When I do hear something I like, and I listen to other tracks by that artist, it usually turns out that those tracks suck balls. How is it that Pandora knows which song is the only good one?
And there is a lot of music that I have that Pandora doesn't know about. So its mostly useless.
Furthermore, Pandora chooses aspects of an artist or song to select songs that are similar, but somehow it chooses the aspects that are what I do NOT like about that artist.

So after you reach your skip limit on Pandora it's very easy to get around that.
1. A song comes on you either you dont feel like listening or you gave it a thumbs down, but it wont skip the song.
2. Just hit the refresh button on the top of your page, it will skip the song; and you can refresh the page as many times as you want I probly do it 12-20 times per day, be sure to rate the songs you hear before you refresh the page, otherwise they might play again.

I don't mind the ads, the skipping limitations, etc.
It's free music, often things I've never hear before.

The problem I have with it is that it seems to decide that it needs 90% of my cpu power just to exist, or something. What the heck.

I can only accept this in those very rare moments, where I'm not actually using my computer for anything, but I'm still near it. And even then, because I don't use it otherwise - since if you're going to take that much of my CPU power, you better be taking that much of my attention, too, and though I listen to music just to listen to it sometimes, that's no good the rest of the time...

Well, tangent went, but because I don't use it otherwise, I never think to use it when I wouldn't mind using it.

tl;dr pandora is DEAD to me. DEAD I say, DEAD!

Everybody wants something for nothing. You gripe about commercials. You gripe about having to pay $30 a year (yes, an entire year!) for free, customized music. You gripe about network interruptions. Well, you get what you pay for.... and at zero cost that entitles you to no complaining! None! This is why Pandora is now asking for subscriptions to support their efforts. Pay a nominal fee, avoid the commercials and interruption in playtime. These people have spent a lot of time creating what I think is an incredible music experience. Perfect? Probably not. Superior to most options? Hell yes! Quit your bitching and pitch something in to support the project. $30 a year is so nominal it's embarrassing that anybody would even complain about it.

Far too many commercials. Previously I used to listen to pandora to find new things to listen to. Now there are a truly ridiculous amount of ads, in addition to there being video ads (Which are terrible) even when I listen to 4 seconds of a song and switch the station. To be honest my typical response is to remember the companies interrupting my enjoyable experience, and not buy things from them. But to be quite frank, I won't be using pandora anymore because of the ludicrous amount of advertising, I will be advising everyone I recommended it to originally to do the same.

Ironically the royalties they're forcing you to pay, which caused you to increase advertising, which made more users leave have probably lead to more lost revenue on the part of labels. As I won't be buying the music of any bands I do not know about, and this was the best method of hearing new music similar to what I already enjoy.