From what I remember, Pandora did that really well. It's been a while since I've used it, but their classification system was really cool.

I switched from Pandora to Spotify a couple months back because my daughter wanted Spotify and they have a family plan, and I didn't want to pay for both services. I really, really miss Pandora, to the point I may pay for it separately (and I don't listen all that often), specifically because I love how their radio station type format works. If they had their "play this exact song I want" offering working before Spotify entrenched itself, I can't imagine why anyone would choose Spotify over it.

I'll probably spend a bit more time trying to get Spotify to work as I want, but in general it's resulted in me just listening to less music. I guess that's good for Spotify, since they're still getting paid (but not if it makes be question why I'm still paying them).

Yes, this is still true, and it's great. Within the songs and artists that typically play on my Pandora stations, it will play similar songs in clusters, with the exception that it won't play the exact same artist twice in close succession. This makes the playlist a lot better (in my opinion).

The only quirk I've noticed is when the same person has multiple bands... I've had it play Jack White or Les Claypool 4 times in a row, for example.

That's funny, I don't like how Pandora works on the custom stations I've tried to build. It feels too much like it is going through the set of seed artists in some repeating order, playing a batch of similar items to one seed before switching to the next batch.

I'd much rather have these sub-genres woven together with changing styles at each track boundary, as a sort of counterpoint.

If I can remember all the way back to when I used to make my own "mix tapes" transferred from vinyl records, I think I used to do this sort of interleaving. So, I think my preference existed before I ever experienced the shuffle of a 5 or 10 disc Sony CD changers, which usually changed discs on every track change and avoided any repeats until the entire set was done.

Because of my preference for shuffle, I used to burn a CD or two for use in rental cars, where I added a pseudo-random prefix to the file names. This gave me a shuffled play when the in-dash player was set to just play sequentially, so I didn't have to discover a random mode with repeats in one particular car...

I was very sad when Pandora left the NZ market. :(

It must be the same algorithm they use to propose new tracks, eg when we play “similar artists”.

“What is the best to listen after this track?” - just with a super small subset of tracks.