I like Pandora because it's simple. Ironically it's Apple that has the reputation for making simple things, but Apple Music is a maze. It has this heart button as well as star ratings. What's the difference? What effect do they have? Why do I still have this "iTunes Store" and this "Music" on my phone? I can't buy songs through the "Music"?<p>With Pandora I hit thumbs up if I like it, thumbs down if I don't. Simple.
I have found Pandora's selection frustratingly repetitive and looked toward using other services because of it. I have made a bunch of radio stations and cycle through them but they always have the same songs mixed in.<p>Now that I have Spotify premium, I see no reason to use Pandora again. Spotify has radio if I want to use it or I can just turn on any song or album I want. That's a big plus in my opinion.
It really surprises me that Pandora hasn't been able to negotiate dramatically better rates than Spotify et al which allow random-access listening. Pandora is competitive mainly with radio, not music purchases. Spotify competes directly with record sales.<p>I've been a very loyal paying Pandora customer for a long time, but now that it's up to $5/mo, I'm seriously wondering whether paying just $5/mo more for Spotify would be worth it.
I was a paying Pandora customer until I hit their limit for the number of stations one can create. I'd made 100 stations, tried to add one more, and it wouldn't let met. Then I went to Rdio, and I've been happy ever since!
Funny, because Pandora turned profitable in 2014. Much like musicians have seen their royalty earnings potential decrease in the face of music-streaming companies that are debt-financed, Pandora is seeing its earnings potential decrease due to other debt-financed companies (Spotify), or bigger companies that can have loss-leader departments (google/youtube, apple).
Pandora's repetitiveness can be frustrating at times especially for long time users of the service. The best option I've found found when creating new channels is to use "Add variety" and avoid the thumbs up / down rating. In this way I still hear new music and although there are repeats those are fewer and far between. If I want to tailor a station to genetically similar songs I then use thumbs up / down.
I wonder why we haven't seen something similar to what Netflix and Amazon is doing with music. That is, cutting out the middleman and pay some artists to make exclusive music for them.