It seems obvious that Pandora doesn’t know which tracks are AI, so they can’t label or filter them.
As far as I can tell there is no real Music Genome Project anymore, and they just use the same set of music syndication platforms as everyone else to funnel music straight into listeners’ feeds with minimal categorization, or categorization just provided by those platforms. They have become pure middlemen and have been slowly dying for years.
You can see it everywhere, in the complete lack of progress on their apps or listener experience. The app UX hasn’t changed in over a decade, which is pathetic. They have their revenue and expense ratios dialed in and have pared down their R&D to the bare minimum. I doubt they have enough of a viable engineering team left to do anything; they’re likely completely outsourced and just do what’s needed to update apps for new OS versions. They have grown fat and lazy farming subscription revenue from all of us, and we’ve been relatively undemanding even as streaming has become commoditized. We’re all just locked in because of our curated stations. They know it and the bean counters are terrified.
I suspect now Pandora is raising their rates because they have to invest and start developing real tech to filter AI and do it before all their listeners abandon them to the deep-pocketed players who already can afford to use AI to filter AI. They have to rebuild their atrophied engineering team, and instead of taking a hit on the expense side they’re going to raise revenue and hope that enough of us will stay that their death spiral doesn’t accelerate too much before they can pull off a miracle.
I am a loyal 17-year user and am actually somewhat tolerant of AI music factories in my feed if the tracks can hold their own. But the flood is happening and I really don’t want to deal with it, especially while paying more.
