Hi guys,

I'm the CTO over at Pandora and have been a Slim Devices customer for
years and years -- just recently replaced a pair of SliMP3's with new
Squeezeboxen. 

Here's the scoop: you're hearing Britney or whatever because sometimes
our recommendations aren't perfect. That's the whole story. We work
hard to get it right, but sometimes we just get it wrong. Every single
song you hear is dictacted by mathmatics -- you can't buy your way into
the Music Genome or into a playlist. Period. 

We are subject to song and artist repetition rules set forth in the
statutory licenses in the DMCA but that something that's also true of
every other Internet radio service. These rules are called the
"performance complement" and say that we cannot play in a three hour
period:

* more than three songs from a particular album, including no more than
two consecutively

* four songs by a particular artist or box set

We've just recently enhanced our playlist algorithm in a way that we
hope will thwart some of this. Here's what we've done: we look for
patterns in the aggregate feedback on a particular station. So let's
say that we're playing Spears on a Radiohead station. Pretty quickly
the Radiohead listeners make it clear that the song doesn't work for
them as a group. When enough feedback aggregates we stop playing that
song in that context. It takes some time for these effects to kick in
for a station, but once it does a lot of these strange matches get
pulled automatically. Of course your thumbs down on a song will ban it
from that station with one click.

That's it. Honestly. If you hear stuff on your stations that makes you
scratch your head and wonder what's going on, drop me a note at
tomconrad-at-gmail-dot-com and I'll be happy to chat about it. 


Tom Conrad
CTO @ Pandora


-- 
tconrad
------------------------------------------------------------------------
tconrad's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5989
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24659

_______________________________________________
squeezenetwork mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/squeezenetwork

Reply via email to