I detest Barbershop Quartet Music. I have been down thumbing it for DECADES, but I still frequently (sometimes several a day) suffer it on my Mark Knopfler/Emmylou Harris Channel. Thumbs down does nothing. Pandora's "algorithm" is fictitious. Seriously, Barbershop Quartet music should only be broadcast by specific demand, in writing.
FYI, Back was Pandora was new, I once had a paid Pandora subscription. The Barbershop Quartet issue presented itself on day one. Halfway through my subscription I called Pandora customer service, back when you could do that, and got a disinterested young man who said to thumbs down a few Barbershop tracks and it'll stop. A couple of weeks later I called again and got the same young man. I informed him that the Barbershop noise was still playing, sometimes a couple an hour. He said that was impossible, because of Pandora's magical "algorithm". We went around about how the "algorithm" didn't work. According to him it was flawless. I politely explained that I wasn't going to pay to hear Barbershop music, and if it wasn't a fixable problem, I wasn't going to renew my subscription, it was that simple. He accused me of "making threats" and refused to let me speak to a supervisor. Not only that, but the Barbershop "somehow" became more frequent. I didn't renew. Despite giving the thumbs down to every Barbershop Quartet song ever recorded , I still get them. I got another yesterday, but Barbershop has been steadily replaced by Gangster Rap in several languages. There SHOULD be a way to flat out delete or ban an entire unwanted genre of noise from a Pandora users feed. Pandora shouldn't be a forced music appreciation experience. People want to hear what they want to hear and the thumbs down feature is useless.
If Pandora ever wants to gain more paid subscribers, they need to FIX this. Pandora is chasing away paid customers by force feeding unwanted obnoxious noise at customers who don't want it.
