Pandora is not very good

[KevShmev]

In our new office, which is most awesome, our operations room consists of about 10+ of us and we have speakers on both sides of the room, rigged up to a phone that our boss got that has Pandora on it, and we get to take turns picking music every day to have on throughout the work day, which is pretty great to be able to listen to music while working.

However, it is shocking at how kinda lame and predictable the stations are.

Pink Floyd - get ready for nothing but Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Rush - get ready for nothing but Rush, Floyd, LZ, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Genesis - get ready for nothing but Genesis (only the hits from the 80s), U2, the Police, Tears for Fears and solo Phil Collins.

And always the same handful or so songs from each artist.  Jeez, you would think a little variety would be in order, no?

I think the 80s party playlist is the one we listen to the most, and I swear, Billie Jean gets played like once an hour.  I mean, it's a classic and a great song, but I don't need to hear it 8 times a day.

The classic rock playlist gets played a lot, too.

Fortunately, the two ladies who like country have mercy on us and rarely play that (when it is their turn).

I have busted out the Porcupine Tree and Muse playlists, albeit briefly, and even those were kinda lame.  The PT one played them and then Riverside and Redemption...wtf?

[Calvin6s]

You are doing it wrong.

Have everybody pick 5, 10, 15, whatever .. but the same number of stations for each person.  Then play via shuffle.

Don't pick something like:  Dream Theater, Fates Warning, Queensryche, Circus Maximus.  It will be a very boring pick.  Pick something like
Dream Theater
Curtis Mayfield
The Cardigans
Beatles
Nine Inch Nails

Or Bring Me the Horizon, Ozric Tentacles or ....
Try to avoid extremely similar genres.

My only problem in professional group situations is I have to remove stuff like:
Megadeth or even more extreme metal.  It is only a matter of time for somebody to complain about the noise.  Worse, it will probably be a Megadeth song you don't even like such as "Pull over shithead.  This is the cops ..."  Comes up.  That will be met with "who the fuck put that on the list?"

Or maybe the Dream Theater Home porno section comes on.  Yeah.  We can't have that in the office.
Hip hop song comes on next talking about bitches and hos (and boats).  "Now that's music Kev!!!"

[Nekov]

I think the problem with Pandora is that you have to actively use it. There's an option for skipping songs or liking them and over time pandora will adapt to your tastes and bring new stuff in. I personally never used it a lot because of that.

[Calvin6s]

Also, you can suggest something like a portable hard drive and cheap player like the WDTV thing.

You can bring in 10, 100, 2000 of your favorite songs and put it in the Kev folder.  It will play FLAC quality and output via toslink / coax or HDMI or just old style left-right.  It has two USB inputs, so one can be for the HDD and the other for flash drives for people to bring in.

But a reused computer is probably easier considering it doesn't really need to be portable.

[Bolsters]

I think Pandora has a relatively small library aswell, only about half a million or so. Which sounds like a lot but compared to Spotify's 20 million it's rather poor.

The phone attached to the speakers running Pandora can also run Spotify free, and then people can pick albums or make playlists. I'd probably push for that.

[pogoowner]

Even if you try to create a larger mix and actively like/dislike songs, you get very little variety on Pandora. You will mostly hear the same few songs from each artist every day.

[Dream Team]

I put on 70s and 80s hits for a little variety, but yes they play the same songs way too often. Not much better than hit radio stations in that respect.

[Ben_Jamin]

I like it for the discovery of new music factor. The more obscure the more obscure you'll get. It depends on the genres. If you use it for more popular stuff then yes it'll repeat .

I don't mind it at all. But then, I hardly use it or Spotify

[hefdaddy42]

I think the problem with Pandora is that you have to actively use it. There's an option for skipping songs or liking them and over time pandora will adapt to your tastes and bring new stuff in.

This, you have to actively use it and like/dislike, and you can actually add artists to various channels you make. 

If you just turn it on and let it play, without any extra input, you won't get much variety because it isn't getting enough info from you to adapt to your tastes.  I wouldn't even think of using it in an office setting like you describe.  Simply not the right tool.

[TioJorge]

What Hef and Nekov said. That actually goes for any radio streaming service (well...the three that I've used). I thought the same thing about Apple Music's radio and after facepalming and realizing they had the like/dislike feature I've got a few stations that are amazing and have found some great new music or bands I hadn't checked out yet but wanted to.

But I know how you feel. A restaurant I used to go to all the time did the same thing and usually put on the "pop" or "indie" stations and I swear every time I walked in there it'd be a song I had heard the last time I was in...except I had heard it like three times in the couple hours I was there.

[dparrott]

I've listened to it for years, but it's getting too repetitive and too many ads for me.  I'm using iheartradio and accuradio more.

[Calvin6s]

My car came with a usb input (I assume that is common these days), so I immediately bought a very small 64gb flash drive for next to nothing and load it up split into a folder called BEST and a folder called NEW.  Best has 100s of my favorite songs.  NEW has all the albums that are *new*.  They usually stay in the NEW folder until I run out of room and a newer album pushes out the oldest album.

My home has a HDD just for music.  The workplace has a HDD just for music.  So I really don't spend a ton of time listening to Pandora.  If I'm out in the yard working or taking a walk for instance.  Or if I start to really like a new band, I plug them into Pandora and see what type of similar bands show up.

Recently I plugged in Twelve Foot Ninja.  And even though I have heard The Dillinger Escape Plan music for what feels like a decade, it never hit me as something I'd love.  But then the Twelve Foot Ninja station played One of Us is the Killer.  And I really loved it.

When I'm just using Pandora to fill up some silence (like taking a walk), then running shuffle for the 50 to 100 of stations I put in gives me quite a big playlist.  I save thumbs up for songs that I truly love and thumbs down for songs I absolutely can't stand.

[KevShmev]

The goofiness of Pandora was demonstrated quite clearly again today.  We turned on the classic prog rock station and one of the first songs we heard was Rock and Roll by LZ. How on God's earth is that song classic prog?   Granted, in the 3+ hours we had it on, we did get The Camera Eye, Dogs, Shine On You Crazy Diamond and the first two parts of 2112, but by and large they were playing the short catchy songs by bands usually called prog: Teacher, Locomotive Breath, Still...You Turn Me On, From the Beginning, Tom Sawyer, Time, Owner of a Lonely Heart, What's on My Mind, etc.

[Kotowboy]

INB4 Chino

[KevShmev]

Question: how quickly does Pandora update stations with new stuff?  The DT and Neal Morse stations are still in the rotation at work, thanks to me, but I have yet to hear a single song play from the last two Neal Morse albums or a single DT song from the Mangini era.