Pandora’s Musicbox
Thursday, 8 December 2005 by Jacob TomawEvery Wednesday night Joscelynn comes home from marketing class and we conduct our own discussion group for the class. The class sounds amazing but Jos is worried that the professor does not think she is participating because the professor says exactly what Jos is thinking as she is thinking it.
Last night, Jos came home and told me about Pandora. Pandora is a music player with a mission, “To help you discover new music you’ll love.” Enter a song or artist you like. Pandora will then play a song by the artist. Then it will play a song that is like the one you just heard. If you really like or dislike that song, tell Pandora. Then it will play another song. Rinse and repeat.
Pandora is built off of The Music Genome Project which is
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 Pandora is amazingly easy. The interface is a very slick Flash application. The quality of the music is amazing. As you listen to and rate the music you are building a station. Sign up for an account and you can listen to this station anywhere you like. You can have up to 100 stations!
We are not talking just indie music or old music or just one type of music. This seems to be all music. I am building alternative rock, country, hymn, and Christmas stations. There are a couple drawbacks that do not bother me much. Pandora cannot play the exact song you request and you cannot go back in the list. The first is due to the way their licensing agreement works and the second is probably a symptom of the first. You can pause the current song and skip the current song, with no delay for loading.
They can do all this legally because they have a licensing agreement. A licensing agreement that I am sure is not cheap. So how are they turning a buck? First, there are ads on the site and the promise to add more ads as needed. Second, there is a pay version where ads are removed, only $36/year or $12/quarter. Third, they provide links for you to buy the music from The iTunes Music Store and Amazon. I imagine there are kickbacks in there somewhere.
Check it out, digg it, and love it!
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December 8th, 2005 at 10:12
I am making a comment on my old roomie’s sizzlin site. Just showin some love and givin some props to the country boy. Represent in the LP! This Pandora deal sounds cool. I am gonna check it out. Thanks for the hook up. Stay warm and happy holidays to the peeps! YAy Yay!
December 16th, 2005 at 9:01
Do you ever have trouble with spam in your comments? Cause I just got hit with a wave of it. I know greymatter commonly will get hit when you don’t do anything to block, but I wondered about Blogger.