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Say What? Humans As Programmers

People don't care how their audio service gives them what they want, just as long as they get it, and get it for free.

The rest of it is just marketing.
 
TheBigA said:
Pandora would probably say it's with the help of humans. Someone has to program the computer. That's how the computer comes up with the music choices.
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During my working days as a programmer I always used to laugh when I heard that "it was a computer problem". More times than not it was a human error programmed into the computer. The computer making an error is virtually unheard of (at least it was when we primarily used IBM mainframes instead of Microsoft junque).

If you programmed the computer to select music with substantial drum beats you could wind up with Sandy Nelson's "Teen Beat" followed by Megadeth's "Trust" followed by Buddy Rich. Wouldn't that be a segue destined to knock the snot out of a PD (or, more likely, a station owner)?
 
You could, but Pandora looks at several parameters to put up a playlist. I find that Pandroa is very conservative about introducing variety - if I seed "Reba McEntire radio" they will play me 3 Reba songs an hour until I start liking the songs by Shania Twain or Alan Jackson that they'll add in. I would be very surprised if I got the Gather Gospel Band just because I liked Reba's "You Lift Me Up To Heaven."
 
landtuna said:
Wouldn't that be a segue destined to knock the snot out of a PD (or, more likely, a station owner)?
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I think it would, and that's why you wouldn't program a computer that way.

When Pandora came up with it's "genome" project about 15 years ago, it was very state of the art. They keep refining it to make it better, but AFAIC, it's not unlike what YouTube does in terms of selecting similar songs. My point is there's not much difference between Apple and Pandora in terms of the human touch in music programming. The difference might be in the AMOUNT of human involvement. But yes, actual people are involved in creating the algorithms that make up the Pandora genome.
 
Maybe if we let the HAL-9000 select our music we could hear Pat Boone and Dean Martin more often.
 
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