A couple weeks back the folks at
Pandora just held a town-hall meeting in Denver to discuss Pandora's history, future, and the things Pandora is planning to do to bring you customized music-listening to you everywhere you go. What is Pandora? If you haven't heard, Pandora is
like an online radio station, but not only that, Pandora helps you find related music based on what artist or song you give it. Pandora creates stations out of your tastes then allows you to tweak the collection of music for that station by thumbing a song up or down. Pandora is really an incredible piece of software that according to Tim Westergren (our town-hall speaker and Pandora founder & CEO) has two main objectives: The first one is to help all those starving musicians get their music to the masses in a way that will help would-be fans find great new stuff. The second is to cater to music listener's unique tastes by giving them a customizable listening experience, and did I mention it is FREE for the taking? For music fans, casual listeners and even audiophiles, Pandora is the thing to be rocking out to on the net. For those who haven't seen Pandora, check out this video for a taste, and then get on over to Pandora for goodness' sake!
The mechanism that runs Pandora's uncanny magic, the
Music Genome Project, is a very complex one that requires almost 400 different "genomes" (scores) per song to be assigned by well-educated music professors and musicians who listen to the song carefully to determine its musical genome or very specific DNA. This process is complicated, and requires these music experts to have a lot of training before they can even use Pandora's rating system. This idea of pulling these somewhat ethereal musical attributes (call it meta-information if you like) right out of a recording by listening to it is a great one, and Pandora works well because of it.
Many companies have licensed Pandora's unique "Music Genome" data to better the recommendations on their own music sites, which says something for its high quality. Tim says that though Pandora does much of this today to pay the bills, their focus really is on the artist and the listener, prompting them to take more steps toward getting the music out there for people to listen to, and making it easier for artists to find a voice. Tim gave us some vague details of the things Pandora may or may not be planning, but time frames and even the likelihood of some of these things may be up for grabs. Here are some ideas you
might see Pandora putting to good use in next few years:
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