* Opening Pandora's music box
Today, I’m probably going to use up a chunk of your time – certainly longer than it takes to read this newsletter. The way I’m going to do this is by discussing a Web-based service that will at the least pique your interest but if you love music will probably fascinate you.
The service I’m going to discuss is named Pandora after the mythical Greek, Pandora, who received the gift of music from Apollo (and who also was involved in that box incident).
Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project, an attempt to profile pieces of music so that they can be essentially fingerprinted and searched for similarities – in other words, here’s the “genome” of a piece of music I like, what have you got that is similar?
To do this Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren, assembled a group of musicians and gave them thousands of records to review using an objective analysis system to profile some 400 characteristics of each piece of music. These characteristics – the “genome” of each piece – include detailed breakdowns of beat structure, instrumentation, and vocals (such as range, vibrato, ornamentation, and so on).
When you sign up you can create “stations” (up to 100 for free or unlimited for a small fee). To create a station you enter the name of a musician or a track and the Pandora Flash-based Web interface will play either that track or something by the artist and display the track, artist, and cover art (if available) in a horizontal film roll style display.
When that track is finished, another similar track will be played and you can, while it is playing, pause the playback, skip to the next track, or click on the details and indicate that you like or don’t like the piece. You can also add the track to your favorites list or be taken to iTunes to buy the track or to Amazon to buy the album.
You can add more artists and tracks to a station and edit your additions if you feel the style of the station has wandered too far due to your modifications.
You can share your station with other people by e-mail and access your station from multiple computers simultaneously, although due to the distribution technique used, the various machines will not be synchronized during playback.
Pandora’s distribution system is interesting: The pieces of music are encoded as Flash audio objects and streamed to your PC from Pandora’s servers to be cached locally. This ensures a clean, error-free playback and is limited to just a few pieces simultaneously cached to ensure compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Pandora pays ASCAP, BMI, and other performing rights societies, just as any radio station would do, which raises interesting questions about the nature of online music services but we’ll leave that for another time.
The end-result is you get a number of “stations” of music tailored to your tastes. And it works amazingly well. Most of the people I have shown Pandora to love it and they complain that they spend far too long playing with the system. And that’s the big hook: If you love music you’ll find you can’t help but keep trying to find new artists you might like.
The only people likely to be disappointed with Pandora are the diehard classical fans – Pandora has yet to include anything in this genre.
The for-fee version of Pandora costs $36 annually or $12 quarterly and simply removes the advertising on the site (something that is currently not at all annoying).
This is a fascinating service and the potential for helping consumers find artists and works they like and leading them into buying is fantastic – Pandora is a sort of self-directed radio with a high contingent informational content.
Here, to get you started try my “Shpongle” station. If you don’t know Shpongle and you like intricate, clever, electronic music then you are in for a treat!
Let me know if Pandora hooks you like it has hooked me!
