Can’t find any station that plays a particular song on Pandora

The Pandora algorithm, in an overly simplified explanation, uses a weighted system on various attributes of your music to determine what you most prefer to hear. When assessing a song on one of your stations, try to compare this specific song to all of the qualities you want your custom station to embody. If you feel this song meets a large enough number of those qualities then you should "Thumbs Up" it. Pandora then adds extra weight behind ALL of the attributes of that song (whether they were exactly what you wanted or not).

Sometimes an upbeat song is what I'm looking for, but because it's also atonal, in a minor key, has a swing rhythm, has a male voice, and harmonized backup vocals (all of which I am trying to avoid) it would be more helpful to "Thumbs Down" on this song instead. If I had done the opposite, I would now get MUCH more of those qualities in addition to the upbeat quality which I originally liked.

Over the long term, your preferred weighting will work itself out but for something as detailed as song length, I think you'll find Pandora will not be able to zero in on that attribute specifically.

(These are my unresearched observations from using Pandora over the past several years.)

thumb : This action narrows the scope of the station; thumbing down a song prevents that song from being played again and thumbing up will make sure that that song is played more and that the scope of the station is limited to songs that are more like it

seeds : This action broadens the scope of the station; adding a song or artist to a station adds variety based on that song

See also

• Getting the most out of Pandora's online music streaming - The difference between Thumbs Up, Adding to Station, and Bookmarks
• What the difference between station seeds and Thumbs Up?