Lucia here, from Pandora. I found your post via web search; I hope you don’t mind me leaving a comment.

There are a number variables that come into play when Pandora is selecting the next song to play on your station: the characteristics of the artist you entered as the station seed, the type of feedback you’ve given on the songs (thumbs up or thumbs down), and any additional artists/songs you’ve added to the station. Pandora lumps all this together and tries to determine what the best musical match is based on our musical analysis.

Sometimes stations do take a little bit of time to “train” to your tastes… Here’s several things to try that might improve your stations:

- Entering a song to create a station is often better than entering an artist. This is because sometimes artists have broad repertoires. This can lead to some eclectic results.

- Enter more than one artist/song into the station. This will add more appropriate songs to the playlist.

- Add multiple songs or artists to a station by clicking the triangle next to the station name and selecting “Add more music to this station”.

- Give feedback: thumbs up songs that do fit in the station, and thumbs down songs that don’t.

- To ban an artist from a station, just give two songs by that artist thumbs downs. Keep in mind, this is station-specific; it will only affect the station you’re currently listening to.

- If you’re sick of a song, but don’t want to ban it from the station, you can always just click on ‘Guide Us’ and put the song “to sleep” for a month.

- Consider only giving a thumbs up to a song when you like (almost) every aspect of a song, because each thumbs up will add more songs to your station, perhaps in a range that is wider than you had hoped.

- Look here (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#88) for more info on creating and tuning Pandora stations.

I hope all that helps!

Cheers, Lucia