Pandora – How The Future of Music is Changing
Pandora’s approach to music more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.
Pandora was founded in Oakland a decade ago, and for much of the intervening time has lived a precarious existence (the founders spent one three-year stretch working without salaries while they scrambled for investors). But thanks in part to the popularity of the Pandora iPhone app, its fortunes have lately improved. It has attracted 35 million listeners and claims about 65,000 new sign-ups a day (more than half from mobile-device users). About 75 companies are working Pandora into a variety of gizmos and gadgets and Web platforms.
Building what is known as the Genome Project. Pandora analyzes every piece of music and then it is broken down into large-scale aspects of music: melody, harmony, rhythm, form, sound (meaning instrumentation and, if necessary, voice), and in many cases the text, meaning lyrics. Each of these broader categories might have 10, 30, 50 elements.
When the Genome Project got under way, the idea of taking music apart and evaluating it by its acoustic elements was not actually new. “Machine listening” was pioneered in various university settings, often by people who had a problem with collaborative filtering’s reliance on social data. Machine listening basically involves teaching computers to assess sound (or really, waveforms representing sound) into something resembling the way that humans hear it, with the goal of eliminating living, breathing listeners from the evaluation process completely.
Pandora claims to add about 10,000 songs a month to its library. The “curation” of Pandora, in effect, falls to Michael Zapruder, another musician who has found himself working for a tech company. Zapruder ended up as Pandora’s curator because he had a habit of identifying holes in the service’s collection. Eventually he was told to fill all the gaps he could. “I had a field day,” he recalls; he’d stroll through record stores, buying every single Johnny Cash CD or every tango disc available, plus anything that looked interesting. He paid attention to users’ suggestions. Somebody wrote in to say that Pandora needed to improve its jazz-trombone selection; somebody else complained about the dearth of barbershop-quartet music. He took care of it. He has beefed up the Latin-music and the J-pop catalog. The major acquisition project right now is Afrobeat, because by far the biggest failed search is Fela Kuti. Zapruder is in the midst of this research but knows that as this new batch of music comes online, “we’re going to get educated by our listeners.” There is no questions that Pandora is the champion of unheard music.
