Pandora Astroturfing for $5
"Why," I kept asking myself. "Why are all these blogs bothering with Pandora?" I won't even link to it because it's mostly a waste of time. Today I came across CREAMaid on MeFi. We'll get to the sex jokes in a minute, but first we got serious business: payola per post.
Are You A
As if the ethical stake's in blogging weren't high enough [I have none!], along comes CREAMaid -heh heh heh- to give bloggers royalties to post. Along with such obscure companies like MacDonald's, another willing to astroturf this impenetrable community was none other than Pandora. No link, but I'll give you a clue. You got a clue now? Because I got one. I got a raging clue.My beef with Pandora is that it's a crappy service. You enter in an artist and it's supposed to find similar artist based on criteria of what that artist sounds like. I enter in the Wrens, and I get -I'm not kidding- "Faster Gun" by the Wrens. Wow. UH-MAZE-ZING! Then the next song is some crappy song that sounds kinda like but not really anything nearly as interesting as the Wrens. It's like a music blogger with shitty taste in music and has no clue what they are doing, kind of like Village Indian. [I kid, I kid]. I don't want bands that sound like the Wrens, I want bands that sound nothing like them, but are equally as amazing in their own right.
Look at die hard fans of Interpol: did they embrace Editors? Mostly no. Because Interpol did Interpol. OK, they did Joy Division, but you get my point. [For the record, I enjoy Editors more. Interpol's too glum]. Why every artist doesn't yield the Beatles I have yet to figure out. Didn't they invent music?
For Pandora, you can't program quality by dissecting individual components of individual songs. As Claude Debussy said, "Music is the space between the notes."
Crap, this rant is running too long. No time for CREAMaid/Bukkake jokes. Not that you really wanted them anyhow.
Written from jerry yeti's cave at 9:20 AM
4 Talk to a Yeti
4 Comments:
No matter what I enter in Pandora (it's accidental filthy joke day!), it spits out Television Personalities. Chuck Berry? Television Personalities. Local H? Television Personalities. Television Personalities? Fish Biscuit.
i fucked with pandora about 6 months ago. it looked promising, with it's Music Genome Project pedigree and whatnot. and i wasn't blown away by it, but it was a good way to at least guarantee background music you would like while at work, and occasionally discover something new.
anyways the biggest problem is that people don't make rational choices about music. no matter how much you know and how much everyone would like to think otherwise, music fandom is still at least 50% herd mentality. sayin.
We'd never use a service like this. Sadly the folks as CREAMAid put us into their system as an _example_ because they "like" us. Sigh.
You can read about it here on their blog:
http://blog.creamaid.com/12
from their post:
"All the Conversations on our site right now are created by us.
These are for our opening event, as well as for testing our service
to see how it could be used and improved.
We picked some sites and businesses that we like and decided to
experiment on promoting them using our system."
Sorry that Pandora isn't really working for you right now; we're always working to improve it. Hopefully you'll give us another chance as we evolve.
Tom
CTO @ Pandora
Hi, we're CREAMaid.
We apologize for the wrong impression we have given you.
Pandora did not start anything with us. We decided to do the campaign for Pandora on our own because we thought the service was cool and more people deserved to know about this service. We will remove the Pandora Conversation from our site right now. Sorry for the confusion.
Lastly, we want you to know that we are not aimed at "shilling for opinions or reviews". None of them are what we are trying to gather.
Many people already think we are shilling for opinions, and our next step is to try hard to show people that it's not what we are targeted at. Please visit our site and take a look at some of the recent campaigns that we are running. We will run some more of those in the future(to convince people that we are not what most people think we are)
Again, sorry for the confusion, and sorry to Pandora.
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