Anybody stuck on a long car ride without an iPod, satellite radio or any CDs had better foresake the hope of listening to good radio. Commercial radio is a wasteland of all but the most popular middle-of-the-road music — and this includes the seemingly dozen “soft rock from the 80s, 90s and today” stations available in every market.
As downloadable music sites seek to give consumers an unending choice of individual music track or album choices, other kinds of music sites are cropping up that more closely resemble traditional radio, but with a decided twist. The New York Times’ Jeff Leeds has this excellent piece today about “The New Tastemakers,” blogs, sites and music services that allow fans to branch out away from record company dictates.
One site that serves as a recurring focus of the piece is Pandora Internet Radio, which employs music “analysts” in its creation of “The Music Genome” project. This major undertaking breaks down the formal elements of songs into their fundamental building blocks in order to fuel a recommendation engine.
Pandora allows users to create radio stations by allowing them to pick a favorite musician or song and then building a playlist filled with songs that mimic or somehow relate to the formal elements of the favored musician or song.
Pandora’s innovation is to focus on the formal elements of songs, rather than their popular appeal. Say your favorite song is Aretha Franklin’s recording of “Respect.” Pandora will make you a personalized soundtrack that could include Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” and Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” (Why? Click twice and learn that Pandora thinks the Gladys Knight tune resembles “Respect” because it includes “classic soul qualities, blues influences, acoustic rhythm piano, call and answer vocal harmony and extensive vamping.”)
I’ve been playing with Pandora all afternoon, and it’s very cool and addictive. Input a band, say “The Killers,” which I did, and Pandora pulls up all kinds of good songs that I might not have discovered any other way. Moreover, if Pandora does pull up a song in your “station” that you don’t like, you can vote it out of the rotation and, more importantly, vote out similar songs. Likewise, if it pulls up a particularly good choice, you can give it a thumbs-up vote.
After only a few votes, Pandora has created a near-perfect radio station.
And unlike the stuff that comes across terrestrial radio, Pandora’s suggestions are just that: users get to rate new songs with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” so if they don’t like what they’re hearing, they won’t hear it again. That has a big effect.
To keep rights holders happy, Pandora doesn’t allow you to pick the song you want to hear, but after some patience, the song you like in fact appears in the playlist. Pandora also won’t let you move back and forth in the playlist to hear favorite songs. Just like a radio station…you have to wait, but in the meantime you’ll hear a lot of music that makes you happy.
Even better, Pandora allows you to email your station to friends, creating a highly personalized form of music recommendation. And you can create as many stations as you want, so you can create a station that sounds like “The Killers,” and another station that sounds like “Death Cab for Cutie,” and on and on.
A killer application, if ever one were created. But, Pandora (and presumably other nascent Internet radio stations created based on user recommendations) hasn’t yet caught fire or generated substantial ad or premium revenues. Pandora plans to sell both website ads and audio commercials on the stations. And, for a small fee, $3/month, you can get all the music without any kind of advertising.
Let’s hope it does catch on, however. Something this cool deserves to be a big success.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:49 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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