Legal Commentary

When I was in high school, one of the New York radio stations had a program gimmick called "Go Figure," in which they would play three songs and callers had to guess the link among the three (which sometimes was pretty esoteric).

I was reminded of this while using the Pandora app this morning. Pandora works by taking a starting-point artist, then playing other songs by other artists that the listener would enjoy (according to the program), presumably because of some similarities among the artists and songs. So please explain the following:

The starting artist was ABBA (forgive us--we watched "Mamma Mia" last night). It played "Take a Chance," followed by the version of "Dancing Queen" from the Original Broadway "Mamma Mia" Soundtrack. So far, makes sense. We then got the following in order: 1) Cyndi Lauper ("Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"); 2) Pat Benatar ("We Belong"); 3) Carly Simon ("You're So Vain"); 4) The Beatles ("Here Comes the Sun"); 5) Fleetwood Mac ("Little Lies").

Now I will say that I genuinely like three of those five artists (not saying which ones). But how or why would an algorithm group those songs/artists for one listener?