I use Grooveshark and I agree that the autoplay is very naive compared to Pandora. A better autoplay algorithm will definitely help but it is hard give you feedback unless we know what you are trying to do with the new algorithm. Currently, correct me if am wrong, your algorithm for recommendation is heavily biased toward genre. It is really hard to discover new songs that I like with it and that's when I fall back to Pandora.
The original algorithm uses a mix of strategies to select songs. Its more or less hand picked. One thing that makes Grooveshark special is that it is all user-submitted content which is terrific from a selection and discovery point of view but an unwieldly problem from a data point of view. Note that our library stands somewhere around 6 million songs compared to Pandora's 600,000 so generating recs has to be done at great scale. The way in which users interact with our site is fundamentally different as well because you can add any mix of songs to your queue at any period in time.
Haha you'd be surprised by how many people love the current autoplay despite it's drawbacks. I have a feeling we're not hearing from the people who don't like it because they end up going to Pandora for better recs. I think it's a problem we can solve though. By our next product launch we'll have the logic in place to make both user groups happy.
