Why Pandora.com Sucks
June 8, 2007 Posted by Tara in : Reviews , trackback,
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Reason #1: If you hear a song or an artist you don’t like, you can rate it so it won’t play again by clicking a thumbs up or thumbs down - unfortunately, this feature doesn’t even work! How many goshdang times do I have to hear Christian rock songs by Reliant K disguised as “like Blink 182″? I don’t know how many times I have clicked thumbs down, yet it continues to play over and over again. And although you can create multiple “stations,” the ratings don’t carry over. So if I try to switch to a new station my recommendation does not carry over.
Reason #2: You can skip songs, but you are limited to 6 skips. Why? I think a song is awful, so I try to move on, but the next one sucks too, and so on and so forth. If I have tried to skip 6 songs, I am forced to listen to every song that plays thereafter for the next 60 minutes. Needless to say I use up my clicks in 5 minutes because this service is awful.
Reason #3: This is the most significant reason I hate Pandora - it never fails that 10 minutes into listening, Pandora crashes and/or slows down whatever else I have open on my computer. Isn’t the intent behind internet radio that we can listen to music at our desks? Well, unless you are allowed to sit and stare at your desktop all day, I wouldn’t recommend listening to Pandora while trying to do work, it’s just too painful.
I equate this situation to the whole independent coffee shop vs. Starbucks scenario - we all really want to patronize the indie shop, it’s good for neighborhoods, the environment and our souls, but inevitably, the wait is longer, they screw up your order, and not everything is always stocked. While I would like to support the Music Genome Project, their service sucks, so for now I will be on Yahoo! Music. Even if Yahoo does have some of the same problems, at least they don’t crash me.
Disagree with this article? Maybe you’d feel more at home here.
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Comments»
I’m with you on this Tara, I’ve been a big fan of Yahoo Music for a while now - in fact, I even subscribe to the service so I don’t have to listen to commercials. There’s some cons to it as well, but doesn’t seem to be as bad as Pandora.com Nice review, very honest on the suckey-ness.
Hi Tara,
Sorry you’ve had such a bad experience with Pandora. We’re constantly debating internally about things like “should your feedback on one station impact other stations” — it certainly helps to hear your feedback about this particular topic. We certainly don’t want to be playing a band you hate on any of your stations. We’ll keep working at that.
The skipping thing is frustrating for us too; we simply aren’t allowed to give you unlimited skips. Yahoo has licenses for their subscribers that offer unlimited skips but that negotiation goes all the way back to 1998. Sadly, that particular style of license simply isn’t available to us today. Wish it was.
Not sure what to say about your machine getting slow or crashing when you leave Pandora running for 10 minutes. I’ve never seen that behavior myself. Firefox/Flash does have a big memory leak that hurts us disproportionally to other websites, but it takes many hours in most cases for that to start impacting machine performance and even then a quick reload of the page clears the issue. Not sure what’s going on in your case… certainly wouldn’t want anyone to have the experience you describe.
At any rate, thanks for the honest feedback. We’ll keep working hard to improve. Hope you’ll check back in from time to time to see if we’re doing better for you.
Best,
Tom
CTO @ Pandora
Thanks for your response Tom, it is always great to get feedback and a better understanding/explaination of why flaws exist. I still do listen to Pandora about once a week and will keep an eye out for progress