Ideas: Lock for creating new stations on Alexa & Google

[m_alvare5]

Hi everyone.  I'm super annoyed with Alexa creating a new station everytime it misunderstands what we requested.  It creates dozens of new stations every week and adds it to My Collection.  We need a way to prevent this behavior.  Maybe a lock mechanism where you need a three digit pin number to create a new station, that way Alexa or the kids won't create stations I don't want.

Moderator Edit: Changing title for clarity

[sbrennan823]

Seriously - 3 YEARS now of complaints on this, with NO FIX!? It's clearly a bug to allow some random visitor to the house to create dozens of stations on MY account in less than a minute by requesting some song whose name they can't remember, trying to "find" the song by saying "play (random lyric words)" to my home's smart device! This is usually at a party where they want everyone else to hear some obscure song, one which of course is usually not even in Pandora's library.

My "playlist" is useless at this point - well over 95% of the stuff in there was randomly added by other people.

Worse - we can't even group-delete stations.  I'm so, so tired of deleting stations that are auto-created. One. At. A. Time.

If this isn't fixed in the next month or so, then going to cancel Pandora. No sense in paying money for a music station provider that is fundamentally unable to recognize that the purpose of a "station" is to be able to quickly return to the same types of tunes - ones the USER has chosen!

[johnirvingleven]

100% echo the sentiment, it is insane that you can’t group delete

John Irving Levenberg
Nueva_Vista_Consulting
johnirvinglevenberg@gmail.com
631 445 4442 (cell)

[JessicaLee]

@sbrennan823 right now the best workaround is probably to set your default music service provider in Alexa to Amazon Music instead of Pandora. You'll still at least be able to listen to Pandora (e.g. "Alexa, ask Pandora to play [name] station/artist/etc"), but if someone just says "Alexa, play blah blah blah" it will try to play it off Amazon Music. Of course that doesn't stop your idiot guests from saying "Alexa, ask Pandora to play blah blah blah" (at which point it'll happily create the 937th station for blah blah blah) but it might at least reduce it.

I went through the insane frustration of purging the spurious stations after changing this, and it's made Pandora significantly more usable for me. I'd still like to see this fixed (and would also like to see a "bulk delete" option in station management), but it's better than nothing.

[sumanball]

There are 7 ideas with more upvotes than this one. All but one of them has been open since 2019. Do the developers at Pandora simply not care about fixing the issues with this platform? This one is a simple fix too. The Pandora team needed to develop the ability for Alexa to create stations in the first place. Simply put a setting in our profiles to turn that ability off if we don't like it.

I'm tired of my son creating new stations all the time (to be clear, he's 2 and he can simply sit in front of the Echo Show and tap on the next suggestion he likes on the screen, creating a hundred new stations in a single day). And no, JessicaLee's suggestion doesn't work. Since I refuse to pay extra for Amazon Music premium, the second Alexa decides that a second Amazon music stream is requested (and that can happen simply because you're already playing Amazon music on the device where you've made a new request), Alexa will start playing on Pandora.

[SJO]

It may be true that Jessica Lee's suggestion does not work.  But the post was entertaining. I gave up wishing for Pandora to actually fix the problem. How many years has it been?  They must be too busy doing god knows what.  My solution now is to periodically weed out the stations I do not want or no longer listen to.  Fortunately I do not have any kids (anymore) mucking up my station list so I can only blame myself for having to clean the stations named Blah, Blah Blah. 😄