I have had Pandora for about 10 years now, maybe more, and I've always loved the platform and the music selection and I've discovered a lot of great music through Pandora Radio, however, in the last couple of years, frequency has been sporadic, I've had several occasions where my music would just not buffer. The songs playing stop and play, stop and play, repeatedly. I thought it was my connection, but I always wondered why no other internet-based applications suffered. This has been on various Android devices throughout the time with Pandora. Today, I've been playing the Pandora Radio on my laptop, and I am not giving anymore excuses for Pandora. My laptop has 150 mb/s download and 235 mb/s upload speeds, yet Pandora radio still suffers to buffer music and continues to stop and play music within just a few seconds of time between. Now that you know my frustration is justified - Dear Pandora:
Please, I don't know how you invest the money you receive for your services, but a company on the path to improving customer experience does not neglect such an important issue. By looking on this community board, I see I'm not the only one... Here is some feedback I hope your developers and management teams take into consideration -
1. Work out this buffering kink and try to provide music services on even the worst of internet connections, at least on general internet connections. You'll be surprised how much this matters to your users.
2. Side note, provide more variety. When I play a station I've played before, I don't want to hear the same 10-15 songs over and over again. I want to play music similar to that artist/song, but not the same music as I've listened to on previous days. I know of the button that can say 'don't play this song for a while', but I don't want to keep clicking that - it's not a fair compromise for me. If anything, offer a one-button/feature that doesn't play the same songs for 50 songs and 100 songs of my history, whether I turn off the app and open it back up another day, the rules would still apply. I've stopped paying for services because of these two deal-breakers. I've begun to turn to alternatives such as Youtube Playlists and specific car radio apps. If I see these two requests fulfilled, I will pay for your services again; and I think I speak on behalf of many, many users who are unspoken.
Thanks for reading - good luck Final Thought: Put funding into improving the user experience. Your software developers are your biggest asset, don't neglect their importance.
mod edit: changed title for clarity
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