Pandora. in The Napkin.

I think I’ve figured out how to game Pandora. See, if you try a really specific station, it’s going to play nothing but that. And you’re going to get sick of it really quickly.

It started when I wanted to create an uptempo station to help motivate myself. I started with Bill Conti and Eye of the Tiger, and handful of other songs. Now, I love Survivor as much as the next person, but when you hear their songs repeatedly, man, it gets old. I tried swapping out my seeds, but then it would play NOTHING but stuff inspired by those new seeds.

Then I tried what I now call the Kitchen Sink Method. I went through my library of music, and picked one song from every artist I liked.

BAM. Pandora started playing a MASSIVE variety of stuff I liked. It skipped around genres, maybe 3-5 songs before clearly skipping to some other inspiration.

I hit the like on things I wanted to hear again or wanted to hear like it, and downed songs I never wanted to hear again. The trick is that sometimes it’ll play a song that isn’t my favorite from an artist I like. I’ll like it, with the hopes it’ll play the artist again. I figure, if it plays that song again, I can always unlike the song.

If Pandora plays an artist I’ve never really heard of or listened to, I add it to the seeds. Bam. New inspiration for Pandora. If one of my seeds seems to cause Pandora to do a bad thing, I remove it.

Huh. This sounded so simple in my head. “Add a bunch of shit, then make Pandora deal with it.” That balance between variety and “shit I like.”