If you haven’t heard of Pandora or The Music Genome Project yet, you’re missing out. Pandora is an online streaming music application designed to not only play music based on your listening preferences, but also to play music by musicians you oridnarily never would have heard before — i.e., the commercially unsuccessful but musically talented indie artist. While Pandora seeks to level the playing field that is the music industry, they’re doing so not by suggesting tunes that are related by sales or labels or genres, but by what they call the Music Genome.
[W]e set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up 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.
One of the most fascinating parts of all this is that the analysis is done by human beings, not by software. According to Tim Westergren, founder of the project, Pandora has a team of professional musicians, all who have at least a four-year degree in music and who must pass rigurous music exams before being hired on by the project, listening and analyzing each track of music that you can hear on Pandora.
Together our team of thirty musician-analysts have been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics … and more - close to 400 attributes!
So, how good is this system? A quick test spin paid off for me immediately. I told Pandora I liked John Digweed, and based on the “highly synthetic sonority, trippy soundscapes, prevalent use of groove and many other similarities” prevalent on Digweed’s discs, it pulled up a Miss Kittin tune that I hadn’t heard before (Rippin’ Kittin by Miss Kittin with Goldenboy) but immediately liked. Ditto the second track, Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers, which was pulled in thanks to “a repetitive verse, a busy acoustic hihat, a tight kick sound, highly synthetic sonority, and trippy soundscapes.” And so on … each new track is pulled in, you can basically give it a thumbs up or thumbs down, and at that point Pandora re-evalautes the tracks it has queued up for you — each choice you make alters the possible tracks you’ll be served down the line.
To sum up, it’s worth registering — it’s completely free thanks to advertising revenue (ah, the Web 2.0 Business Model!) In fact, the system is so intriguing that I would love to be able to download it and carry it around with me — maybe install it on my iPod or something. Or at least I’d like to get under the hood and mess around with the API, which at a recent meet-up in DC Tim Westergren hinted might be open some day…but only after Pandora succeeds as a business. Understandably, they don’t want to peel back the curtain on a proprietary system too soon. Not while there’s money to be made. (Which based on their growth from a few thousand members back in November to a few million now, shouldn’t take long.) Check it out.
P.S. Pandora teamed up with Squeezebox for some kick-ass stereo componentry.