Pandora: Connecting Music Fans with New Talent
Pandora is a twist on internet radio, going one better and allowing you to customize the listening experience to your own taste. The site, from the Music Genome Project, uses a sophisticated recommendation engine to help you discover new songs and artists based on what you currently like. Pandora does a good job of blending internet radio, vodcasting and podcasting and though-provoking blogging on everything music.
The Music Genome Project was born of founder Tim Westergren’s frustration as a working musician and film composer as he watched many excellent musicians struggle. “The central problem is how does a new artist connect with a fan base and make a living?” said Tim in an interview with Crucial Pop. “Also, why does someone like a certain type of music?” In his quest to address this, Tim conceived the Music Genome Project. Staff musicians listen to songs and rate them across 400 attributes, effectively building a profile for each song and artist. Pandora then uses this musicology to connect similar artists and songs.
“The primary benefit of Pandora is the discovery and re-discovery of new artists,” said Tim. While any music can get into the MGP, all music is editorially evaluated. Nearly 70% of the artists at Pandora are not on a major label. In addition to taking submissions from artists and labels, the Pandora staff actively seeks out new artists.
Pandora is feature-rich and includes a well-rounded mix of functionality.
Custom Radio. Pick an artist or song and Pandora will build a custom radio station based on that and similar artists/songs. You can further train Pandora by selecting “I like It” or “I Don’t Like It” from the list of songs currently playing. Additionally, you can manually seed songs or artists into a station.
Pandora is fairly good at building a list that matches your selections. You may find, however, is that it becomes tedious listening to the same type of music song after song. Pandora provides a “Quick Mix” feature that allows you to address this, but you need a fair number of stations defined in order to get a good variety.
Music Sharing. Pandora allows you to build a personal profile and share songs, stations and artists with friends. You can also use the sharing features to find other listeners with similar tastes in music.
Education. For anyone who has ventured into the world of creating, performing or recording music, the Pandora video series is a wealth of interesting information on music, how it’s made and where to hear it. In its early podcast series, The Musicology Show, MGP has done a good job of boiling complex music concepts down to an understandable level.
Blogs. Through the blogs found at Pandora you can join in lively discussions around a variety of topics, including what makes music music. You can also follow Tim Westergren as he road trips around the country introducing music lovers to Pandora.
Pandora Mobile and Home. Let’s face it—a lot of listening is spent away from the computer. Pandora Mobile is available for AT&T and Sprint users and Pandora Home is available on select wireless digital media players.
Following the typical tradeoff of eyeballs for cash, Pandora is ad supported, so you’ll have to put up with ads around the skin unless you want to sign up for an annual subscription. Also, you’ll need to interact with Pandora to discover new artists. Due to licensing restrictions you can’t rewind or replay a song, so when you hear something you like you need to bookmark it. However, the service makes it easy to do this without interrupting the song.
Spend some time with Pandora. Not only will you discover some new artists, you’ll begin to understand what it is about certain types of music that strike a chord (pun intended) with you. This is a web site for those who are analytically curious about music and want to go beyond “I like what I like,” and really understand what makes us tick (musically).
Questions and comments may be sent to Robin.Danek@CrucialPop.com.
