How can I narrow the focus of a station on Pandora?

Question

I have a station that is playing a wide variety of songs. I want to give it another song which has overlapping (desired) traits with the original song seed.

For example, I find two songs that have similar traits, and I want to find more songs that have this trait. I thought I could just create a new station with both songs as the seeds, but according to Pandora, it seems like when you add a new seed it will actually widen the amount of songs played since it will add more variety.

How can I do the opposite and narrow the variety to traits shared by multiple songs?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, pandora doesn't offer any really simple way to do this immediately. But there are a few things you can do:

I'm tired of this song means that you like the song but don't want to hear it as often, so that's no help.

The skip button Doesn't have any lasting effects either.

thumbs down and thumbs up are the correct ways to achieve what you want. Thumbs down means that song will never play again, the next song will be rather different, and 2 thumbs down and no thumbs up will ban an artist from the station. Thumbs are pandora's main tool for knowing what music it should play to you and others, even though it takes a while for you to see any effect. :D

You can't really tell pandora to play less variety, but you can only thumbs up songs of a specific type, so eventually it will only play songs like those.

Answer 2

Adding both songs as seeds is the right way to do this, but then you'll need to get ruthless with the thumbs down button.

Picture it this way: Seeding your station with those two songs may include, say, thirty songs that Pandora finds similar...but all in different ways. So if only three of those songs are the direction you want to go, you should give a thumbs down to the other twenty-seven. This will force Pandora to follow the path of the three you liked, and build another group based on them.

You can also use thumbs up to emphasize songs you like, but thumbs down is more valuable for limiting the scope of a station. (Thumbs up seems to be similar to adding a song seed, but it also plays that song more often.)

Unfortunately, since you only get six skips per hour, it'll take you a while to hone the station to your liking. But the results can be quite good. Though I have some thirty or forty Pandora stations, there's one that I use more than all the other put together because the song mix turned out perfectly after a lot of thumbing down.