I have a couple more observations about the Pandora algorithm. The first is something that was noted in another thread about feature track. This comment was given by CatleaMusic, "It doesn't seem like Pandora's marketing programs and algorithms are designed to support or promote new artists." In support of this, this is how Pandora explained their feature track marketing tool in the latest webinar - if someone has a large number of existing streams, that person will tend to get a proportionally large benefit from feature stream, whereas if someone has almost no existing streams, that person will tend to get almost no benefit from feature stream. Thus, in this case it seems what the algorithm is mainly doing when feature song is on is adding an X% bonus to the normal chance for the algorithm to play a song, so if it's, say, 10% rounded down, then if someone is already getting 1000 streams a day they might see a benefit of 100 streams a day from feature stream, but if someone is getting 1 stream a day they might not see any benefit from feature stream. Pandora also reports that getting a lot of thumbs up or thumbs down will affect how often the algorithm plays a song, but the truth is that Pandora plays radio-style music to mostly passive listeners so there isn't a high number of thumbs up or thumbs down for most songs. Thus, for most songs, it's mostly existing streams driving how this marketing feature works, and the algorithm is actually doing very little beyond adding a simple bonus percentage. Another thing that has happened is that some of my other songs have been added to Pandora radio, but one thing I've found out is that any time I have a collaborating primary artist or even just another artist who is merely featured on one of my songs, that song goes on the radio of a separate station. This might be a good thing, because sometimes my collaborations or songs with different featured singers result in song which have unique aspects from my other songs. I will use the example of my collaboration with Tiago Videira, who mostly composes instrumental tracks, which range from classical music to traditional European regional music. Whereas my songs which aren't collaborations with him tend towards country, rock, pop (with Oualid Ekami as featured singer), or dream pop (with Nekane as featured singer). Tiago and I made three songs together, all in an American folk vein that is truly the product of collaboration and distinct from my individual songs or his individual songs. Interestingly, one of these three songs, "Rollin' On," is a fairly popular song for people who like chill music, though that's on a completely different station yet again because we also used as our featured singer on that song Arkansas native but nowadays Las Vegas-based Justin Carder. Our other two songs, which are on a combined station together, are more niche. So, although my songs are all shown on my main page, only my songs made under the NADRIP name with no other collaborating or featured artists are on that page's radio station, and if there is a collaborating and/or featured artist, then there is are separate pages with separate radio stations with those songs. Or that's my current understanding. These songs have all gone up just in the past few days so I haven't had a chance to find out more yet. In AMP, I have to go to each page separately to see the details about songs which are playing on that radio station, so although all my songs are collected on my Pandora artist page, they are not collected on AMP, and AMP treats each collaboration or different featured artist as a different artist name (ie "NADRIP" is different from "NADRIP & Tiago Videira" is different from "NADRIP & Nekane" is different from "NADRIP, Tiago Videira & Justin Carder"). I did, however, see that my song "Coulda Stayed" (which is a song by NADRIP with no collaborating or featured artists) streamed on the station for NADRIP, Tiago Videira & Justin Carder. So there must be some chance that songs by individual named artists which are similar enough to the collaborative songs will also be included.
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