Question: has anyone tried this website and entered your artist or genre and then it plays what you typed - BUT, later it plays some random stuff and you can't change it?

Yes, I once typed in Smells Like Teen Spirit - nirvana. It played my song and then it played Moves like Jagger. I do not know how you mix those, guess it was a glitch or something.

FalcoDude : I think it's a huge glitch. When I select a certain group and then they play another group... I'll give an example: I picked a certain metal group that I used to listen to and they played them, then out of nowhere Elvis started playing

I think Pandora needs to get their act together

I've tried this out before. Even though I use Winamp, which is a custom playlist for my computer, its pretty good. My teacher uses it during Study Hall when we want music to play. Its pretty handy.

I always get excited when I 'rediscover' Pandora, but then I quickly get annoyed.  I HATE the fact that they let you use it just fine when you first visit, but then every successive visit they want you to register.

I think that because of that, I've never been able to be on it LONG enough for it to play something random.

tRIUNE : I think you misunderstand the design of sites like Pandora and similar services. Before Pandora, I used to use Yahoo! Music Radio (no longer exists) and it functioned in a near-identical manner.

The service is aimed at trying to provide you music that it thinks you may enjoy based upon the input you give it. If you put in Black Sabbath as your initial artist, it'll probably try to find more metal bands. It's not going to just play the same artist continuously. The reason it does this is because they need to somewhat distribute songs by the artists on there. They have contracts and are being paid to feature the music of the artists for whom they've obtained rights to play songs. Given this, they'll try to play any song that has similarities to songs/artists you've told them you liked. As you listen, you can thumbs up or thumbs down. Depending on your input, it gets smarter and builds a more specific profile of your tastes. You have to train it for it to learn. It's just a computer algorithm after all. Of course the more broad your tastes are, the easier it is to be satisfied. If you're REALLY picky, this isn't the type of service for you.

I decided to do something unconventional and more difficult than someone just casually listening for music that sounds good to them... I decided to train a station to play ONLY VGM. I still haven't accomplished it, but I got close. After about a weak, it assumed I only wanted instrumental music and stopped playing regular songs. Later, it started playing VGM and film scores (as well as anime OSTs)... I'm slowly weeding out the other stuff and trying to keep it to video game music. I get it playing a lot of Final Fantasy music, Pokemon, Zelda, Metal Gear... then the occasional Valkyrie Profile 2 song... or a classic NES remake by The Advantage. It's been a fun thing to attempt at least.

I honestly don't know what Pandora is.  The first thing that I though when I say the word was Pandora's Box.  You know the Greek legend of a box contain horrible monsters.  LOL.  Perhaps someone could enlighten this old fellow on what Pandora is.

mr.pace : It's an online radio service that plays random songs loosely based on the first song you choose to listen to on the station. From there, it tries to play similar songs and you can accept or reject those to give the service a better idea of your tastes and what types of songs should play.

Crazy Li : Actually I didn't notice the thumb system until I contacted the staff of the site. Yeah I was a bit embarrassed after they replied back with basically the same thing as what you said. lol.

One thing that is flawed still is sometimes they will deny your rating until sometime after advertisements... but that's sometimes fixed by switching to a different custom channel but sometimes it's the same for all channels you have created.

Business as usual. lol.

That's odd... I've NEVER had a rating denied before. I've had skips denied before... you can only skip songs so many times per day before they stop letting you skip. This causes thumbs down to finish playing and not skip ahead... but it still registers a thumbs down and won't play that song again.

Funny thing is that their ads don't work in older versions of FireFox. I used to browse with a really old version and the radio worked fine by the ads would never play. Since I upgraded, the ads now bother me again. I'd consider getting the membership (which I THINK is ad-free) but it's not unlimited skips which is stupid. It's just an "increased amount of skips". I tried the free trial of it once and still managed to exceed my limit of daily skips, which basically decided then and there I'd never pay for the service. Why should I give them money and still not be able to skip as much as I want?

When Yahoo! had their radio service, the paid membership featured unlimited skips, which I actually went ahead and paid for up until the day they shut the service down. The awesome part about Yahoo's was that they also let you download any song that was in their Jukebox at no additional charge if you were a paying member, so I essentially got free mp3s along with the service.