Accepted Solutions
It's been a few days since you asked me for this information. Sorry for the delay in replying, but I didn't get any notice that you'd replied until this morning, when I received a private email telling me about it. (Not complaining; just explaining.)
Listing every composition that Pandora hasn't "correctly" identified (i.e., hasn't named by composer) honestly would be a full time occupation for one such as myself, because it seems that probably the majority of the classical pieces exhibit this problem. (I do list some below, however.) Also, Pandora can easily learn for itself, for one merely has to play the complete classical station for a while to see that the composers often are not named.
I'm a little surprised that no one has raised this issue before -- but only a little, since I'm sure that the very great majority of Pandora's customers listen to pop, not classical. (Classical music listeners have gone the way of people who read books. Relatively speaking, there just aren't that many any more.) I myself subscribed so I could listen to blues, plus a few other genres, where there's no problem with the way that Pandora identifies the music (and, even more important, where there's a much larger selection of music).
In any case, I'm including several screen captures with this message to illustrate the problem. I've entitled each by composer. For one that's adequately identified, see "CPE Bach." But notice that it's the only one of nine compositions in the screen capture where Pandora bothered to include the album cover. All of the others are merely blank squares. I've never seen an album cover omitted for any other type of music on Pandora.
See the "Telemann" attachment, where the composer's name is missing. I don't listen to Telemann (wrong era for me), but, aside from being familiar with his style, I guessed it was he because while the music was playing (but not afterward) the last line of the identifying info ended with "Tele...". Presumably Pandora made the effort to provide his name, but for whatever reason sufficient screen space wasn't made available. I had to confirm who the composer was by Googling the information that did appear.
See also "Boccherini," "Geminiani," "JS Bach" and "Prokofiev." None of these pieces were identified by composer. Going on memory, I didn't notice any of them, as in the case of the Telemann, providing even part of the composer's name while the piece was playing.
The poor identification of these pieces resulted, I think, from the fact that whoever entered the information was essentially clueless about classical music. And, although it may be uncharitable to say so, I suspect that it was also the case that that person really didn't care. After all, it shouldn't take even a moment's thought to realize that if you simply identify a composition as, say, "Symphony No. 1", even if you also list the name of the orchestra performing it, you've hardly identified it at all, since there are so many Symphony No. 1's floating around. (Who on earth would think that only one person has ever composed a symphony?) Even if you also list the opus number, or the key in which the piece was composed, how does that help a listener who doesn’t already know who the composer is?
Ultimately, I think the deal is that Pandora simply isn't interested enough in classical music listeners. That may also be an uncharitable view. But it's suggested to me not only by the poor identifying information discussed above, but by the fact that the selections are so seriously limited. I've been listening to the complete classical station off and on for only several days, and the Boccherini piece identified above has popped up at least four times, probably more often than that, and there haven’t been any other Boccherini's. There perhaps was one other (a flute quintet?), although I suspect that I heard (only one movement of) that one on the "incomplete classical station.” If the only thing by Boccherini that I hear is the same piece played over and over again over the course of only a couple days, the law of averages suggests that Pandora has very, very little of anything else, possibly nothing else, by that composer. Something that's true of many of the other pieces I've heard. Haydn, for example, composed over a hundred symphonies, yet I've heard only one of them played -- again repeatedly -- on the complete station. I did notice that JS Bach -- another non-favorite of mine -- is all over the place, but only if I try to listen to the incomplete classical station, which I no longer have any interest in doing.
I'll give the complete classical station a few more days, but I strongly suspect that after that my listening to Pandora is going to be limited to blues and other music that Pandora takes more seriously than classical.
