Opening Pandora's Box

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Bradford Day
Kurtis
TheTechLounge
May. 30, 2006

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Who is your favorite band? What do they sound like? Who else sounds like them? Have you ever sat around with your friends and asked these same questions? Chances are that most of your music collection, be it digital, CD or vinyl, was heavily influenced by bands that were recommended to you by friends or other sources. Back in the dark ages before the internet, I could often be spotted at the local record shop bugging the clerks for import CDs and hard to find out-of-print albums. Fortunately, in the internet age I have a much easier time of finding music. With easy access to such services as iTunes, eMusic and Amazon, I've been pretty successful at weaseling out MP3 versions of albums that previously only existed in my music collection on audio tape. Now that I've found that elusive MC Rad album from my junior high days, how do I find new music? Finding new, big label music is as easy as flipping on a top ten radio channel or going to iTunes, but what about independent music? Amazon and eMusic do a good job of suggesting music based on my previous purchases but even they can't cover every independent artist out there. Therefore, those questions still remain...Who else sounds similar to the bands I like and how do I find them?

Tim Westergren asked those same questions. But rather than searching online for new music or confusing the clerks at the record store, Tim did something about it: he founded The Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project (MGP) is Tim's 6 year labor of love that has resulted in one of the most innovative and creative streaming radio services available on the internet, Pandora. Pandora is a user-driven internet music service that relies on listener input to build customized, individual stations on-the-fly. Born directly of The Music Genome Project, Pandora is a free service with big potential. Tim was kind enough to take a few moments out of his busy schedule (which includes traveling around the U.S. searching for independent local music) to answer a few of my questions about what has become one of my favorite music websites.

"A momentary loss of reason," perhaps not your typical source of inspiration, but that is how Tim Westergren wryly explained coming up with the idea for the Music Genome Project. As a veteran musician and film composer, Tim was intimately familiar with the world of indie music. His 10+ years in the music business working with producers and movie directors gave him an acute sense of what people are searching for, musically speaking. As such, Tim and a few friends decided to categorize various types of music in an effort to seek out new bands that exhibited similar qualities. This, in essence, is how the Music Genome Project works. Teams of musicians listen to individual songs and spend about 20-30 minutes analyzing the music. The Music Genome Project relies less on genre-style groupings and more on identifying literally hundreds of musical details in songs so that sometimes The Ramones might just find a common thread with The Dave Mathews Band!well, maybe.

So after a 6 year collaborative effort, developing the MGP's core of genre-bending tendrils and musical overlappings, the natural evolution was to introduce their creation to the public. Tim's original idea was to use the MGP solely as a musical reference chart, a method for finding music with qualities you like, but from bands you've never heard of. And while they do license the MGP technology to companies like Best Buy, the proliferation of broadband internet rerouted the path of the MGP. With a vast percentage of home internet users surfing on a broadband pipeline, streaming music has become commonplace. And so Pandora was born. By utilizing the Music Genome Project's reference technology, Tim and his crew developed a simple interface for creating a user-programmable streaming radio service.

As Tim explained to me, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) made it possible for streaming radio to exist legally while providers need only pay a reduced royalty fee. As such, Pandora is capable of playing music from any and all music labels, from Sony to SubPop. After asking the listener to enter a song or artist they like, Pandora will then search the MGP-based data mines for similar songs and create a station based on the user's likes and dislikes. If you don't like the song Pandora finds, give it a "thumbs down" rating and the search will continue. Find a song you dig, give it a "thumbs up" and the song continues playing while Pandora remembers your preferences. The more songs you approve or disapprove, the more accurate Pandora becomes as it searches through, as Tim put it, "many terabytes" of musical data. And unlike some other streaming channels, Pandora's Flash-based interface streams music at 128kbps, avoiding the static-laden streams many of us are familiar with. I've been quite pleased with the sound quality and have yet to experience any buffer lag. At times I have noticed that Pandora tends to repeat itself and replays songs I had heard earlier in the day. Should this occur you can tell Pandora that "I am sick of this song" and it won't be played again for a month. And even Tim will admit that there are a few playlist anomalies that have crept up. At times, Pandora's artificial intelligence gets overloaded when users send in too many thumbs up/down and the system gets a little confused. But, like all new releases, this issue is being addressed. However, while the DMCA allows Pandora to offer a massive range of artists, it simultaneously restricts the ability to create an on-demand streaming service. So Pandora will eventually get around to playing the song or band you asked for, just not immediately.

Pandora requires a simple e-mail and password registration to begin building your custom stations. And as the Pandora team of musical dissectionists are always working to find new music and enter it into the fold, the rotation of bands changes daily. At first, Pandora was released to a limited group of friends and select users. But in November of 2005, Pandora went live as a free-to-the-public service and currently there are more than 1.7 million registered Pandora users. Free subscribers will notice a few advertisements on their Pandora page as songs play, but for $36 per year you can have your Pandora ad-free. Should you find a song that really strikes a chord, click on the song title and a new page will open up giving you more album information and links to both Amazon.com and iTunes.com, through which you can purchase the track or album. Of course, Pandora gets a referral fee for every purchase you make, but it is a nominal fee not dissimilar from what you would receive were the referral link placed on your own blog.

But what is next for Pandora? Tim explained that due to current licensing restrictions Pandora is only available in the U.S. However, the Pandora team is working on changing that and hope to make the service available worldwide. In the more immediate future, Tim's group is developing a mobile version of Pandora, similar to XM and Sirius personal satellite radio receivers. Pandora is also available for play over the Slim Devices Squeezebox. The Squeezebox is a small stereo-type component capable of playing most digital music files in addition to Pandora streaming radio. A subscription is required for the Squeezebox/Pandora service. But Tim's biggest hope for Pandora is that it will serve as a launch pad for independent music. Tim would "like people to talk about Pandora the way they Google things." With the impact that the internet now has on promoting small independent bands (such as the blog-fed rise of the indie band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah), it is quite plausible that Tim's goals are well within reach.

I would like to personally thank Tim Westergren for taking time out of his busy musical travels to chat a bit over the phone with me about Pandora. If you are into music, surf over to pandora.com and start up your own station. Be sure to check out the Pandora blog and follow Tim's travels throughout the U.S. as he searches for new independent music to add to Pandora's box. And peruse the musical recommendations in every Friday's posts for "No Mainstream Fridays!"

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Add Comment

6 User Comments

1 - Posted by Kurtis on May 31, 2006 - 1:53 am

If you liked this article, please Digg it:
http://digg.com/music/Pandora_streaming_radio_serv...

If you're not already registered, I encourage you to register for Digg - it's a great place to go for all sorts of tech news.

2 - Posted by Mister_Me on May 31, 2006 - 2:20 am

Does Pandora have advertisements on it, like regular radio? I could never stand listening to the radio, due to all the advertisements. Just gets on the nerves after a while.

3 - Posted by Kurtis on May 31, 2006 - 2:46 am

i don't believe it has any actual AUDIO ads... just ads on the actual website. Brad would know for sure though since he's the one who has used it for a long time. I've used it for a few hours at a time on occasion though and don't recall any ads like you hear on the radio.

4 - Posted by J2T on May 31, 2006 - 8:25 am

Nope, no audio ads to this point. I use to use it a lot at work, but my employer has now blocked it due to it using up too much bandwidth apparently. :-P There are ads on the site, but I pretty much ignore them. I still listen to it at home, it beats the radio IMO.

5 - Posted by handrail on May 31, 2006 - 7:58 pm

J2T is correct, there are no audio ads, only ads on the webpage itself...which aren't at all annoying.

check it out and see. you don't even have to register to test it.

brad.

6 - Posted by WVmaniac on July 7, 2009 - 4:07 am

Just discovered this past week! Where have I been? I used to have XM in my car, now I just use pandora on my blackberry and Bluetooth through my Hummer's radio! Way better than XM and knows exactly what I like. No more flipping through controls on my stereo while on those trails- I can actually concentrate on where I'm going, the scenery, and sit back and enjoy the tunes. The only thing that sucks is that I occasionally loose service in these country road mountains of West-by-God-Virginia.

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