Sasha C.

This is just my opinion:

We listen to Pandora every afternoon and have discovered when you create a station utilizing an artist, after about an hour we start hearing repeats, more songs are from free compilations rather than releases by the artist, and after two hours it completely loses the plot and begins to choose songs that are in no way associated with the time, genre or anything remotely connected with the chosen artist.

However, when you select a song for your station, the selections are much more related to the time period of the artist as well as genre & genre evolution of the artist. It can go all afternoon with nary a repeat.

And finally, I mentioned in another review that utilizing Pandora via the online music option of the Marantz receiver, we never hear a commercial on our free account. Although I have to admit we also have a hardware firewall on our network running pfSense, and it could be truncating the commercials. It literally shuts down non functional outbound communications from devices like phones, computers, receivers, Alexa, etc.

After dumping the log of truncated outbound messages, I was astounded by the number of messages every minute being constantly sent from your digital devices to Google (massive amounts), Microsoft, Amazon, and a large variety of marketing companies with cookies on your phones & computers. Alexa was incredible. You realize it sends most of what you say within earshot - so if you are at all concerned about privacy, take some basic steps and control the amount of data they collect from you that allows them to design ways to incent your behavior before outright controlling it.

Hope all this helps, and keep on loving music while maintaining your privacy!