Introduction to Pandora

Seeing as this blog will be dealing primarily with Pandora.com I figured I should give a basic introduction to the site.

In January of 2000, founder Tim Westergren and others set out to analyze thousands of songs by measuring "everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and...singing and vocal harmony." Through these different analysis' Westergren and his team were able to construct distinct attributes for each individual song that could link songs together. They now have a collection of 400,000 songs from over 20,000 artists.

What I found really interesting about this was the uniqueness of this creation. Because Pandora selects the next song as opposed to you selecting it yourself, it really eliminates any bias or judgement. I do not search through a catalogue of music and pick the next song I want to hear, the site actually picks the next song for me.

Pandora also does not limit your music to certain genres. When you enter into the site, you do not select genre's you'd like to hear, instead, you simply enter one song or artist that you like, and the computer guesses what music you will also like from there. The songs that appear do not come from any one category, they are merely judged by their attributes, not by their alleged genres. In the summary on the actual site, Westergren states, "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."

As a result, Pandora reaches past the bounds of traditional radio (where typically you can only hear music from certain genres) as well as past the bounds of your own bias (I might not listen to a CD because i didn't like the cover, or because the band's name turned me off). Pandora allows access to a seemingly limitless music scene. Without limitations to genre or bias, Pandora becomes a very unique place to listen to music.