Pandora: Music to your ears

The past decade really has been an extremely mixed bag for music listeners. With mp3 players, p2p networks, and more recently jump parties, it is easier to get access (legally or not) to music everywhere.

But where do you discover new music?
Sure, there are blogs dedicated to reporting new musical trends in various genres. iTunes or Amazon gives you recommendations about artists that are similar to yours. And I guess you can listen to terrestrial radio. If you want to hear 'Crank Dat' by Soulja Boy, or 'Big Girls Don't Cry' by Fergie. Again. and Again. and again and again.

But I don't have to tell you how obnoxious terrestrial radio is. Because chances are, you already knew that. And you probably stopped listening a few years ago, unless some aspect of your car stereo isn't working.

But this phenomen has happened not because broadcasting music you have never heard before is an outdated model, just that the groups in control have stagnated to a point where they are almost beyond saving. (check out the link above if you are interested at all in the demise of terrestrial radio).

Enter Pandora.com.

Pandora is an online radio provider that brilliantly delivers personalized radio stations based on your musical preferences. When you open the website for the first time, a display box asks you for the name of a song or artist you enjoy. Upon entering this name, Pandora accesses 'The Music Genome Project," described on their website as,

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Using this Genome, Pandora will play songs with similar genes to those of the one you originally selected. Everytime a song is played, a small box appears on the player on the webpage, allowing the listener to give the song a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Whether the listener likes this song adds to the musical preference of this particular station, thus fine tuning the musical tastes of the user even further.

But really, the genius beyond this is that it allows users to listen to music that is outside of what they may normally listen to. When you meet someone new, you may find yourself asking them, "What kind of music do you like?" with responses generally originating into genres that have been constructed from a business perspective of selling more music. Good for the record companies, but in reality, listener tastes are much more complex than that. Pandora recognizes this, and in my own experience, delivers with flying colors. Over this weekend, whenever I have been on my computer, I have been listening to Pandora. I have reconnected with old music (First of Da Month- Bone Thugs and Harmony), and I have been introduced to new artists, (The Black Pack) and songs by artists I enjoy but hadn't been previously exposed to (Incubus, Daft Punk).

Of course, there are some problems with Pandora that need to be addressed. Besides almost being shut down about a year ago, Pandora also is vulnerable to failure because it relies soley on the genes of a certain song to recommend new music, which can be problematic because the program can not always pick up quickly why a listener likes a certain song. For instance, I put Forever by Chris Brown into the program to see what appeared, and the first five songs I didn't really like, most of them missing the dance vibe and soulful playfullness of Chris Brown's voice.

Last.fm, another online radio station, has no algorithim for predicting what music a user will like, but instead uses a vast social network to determine what kind of music a Chris Brown listener would like based on people in the network with similar tastes. Steve Krause, VP of Analytic Products at CNET, writes in his post, Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders, that,

Last.fm simply describes what goes together according to its audience and then makes relatively simple inferences from that. So if there are hidden factors that Pandora isn't explicitly capturing, Last.fm is at least capturing them indirectly.

This social factor on Last.fm also recommends like minded listeners to users, making it more interactive than Pandora.

All told, I really enjoy Pandora, even if it does not play songs I love everytime. It is able to play songs that sometimes come out of left field, but that I find myself adoring, something I could rarely say about terrestrial radio in my life. While it does not have the social networking capabilities of a last.fm, I have still been using the program and enjoying it non-stop since I got it. And thats what really matters. Well maybe not to you, but to me.

And finally, this video is courtesy of Pandora reminding me of my favorite music video from 3rd grade...