The Squeezebox

So interestingly enough, I found a new invention with the help of Pandora's advertisements. The squeezebox is a small electronic device that can be hooked up to your stereo to play music from the Internet. From what I understand, it works really well with Pandora because it will actually play the stations you select from Pandora. The squeezebox also has a remote control, so you can sit anywhere -- you don't necessarily need to be at your computer anymore -- and switch stations, or give the songs ratings. The other perk of this invention is the fact that you can access Pandora even when your computer is off.

In a recent article, David Pogue of the New York Times reviews the Squeezebox. The article explains the device, and also mentions Pandora. I thought one line of the article was particularly interesting for this case study. He writes, "[The Squeezebox] offers all the new-music serendipity of Internet radio, with the personal touch of your own CD collection. Again, with the help of the Internet, we are seeing a huge influx in personalization. Now that we have access to it (Pandora, the squeezebox) we are increasingly getting more involved in things that cater to each one of us individually. Unlike the radio which generally strives to please a general public, Pandora is trying to please each individual person's taste. This feature probably enables Pandora to reach a much wider audience, and this is why Pandora is such a groundbreaking creation.

Pandora's Blog

So it turns out Tim Westergren has his own blog. It's pretty interesting, he wrote a post awhile ago mentioning all the new features on the site. They were specifically created because of listener suggestions, which I thought was kind of neat. They are striving to allow people to personalize the site even more. Some of those new features really do improve the site too. There is a now a button that links all of your individial stations together, so you can combine a lot of different interests, as well as another button that allows you to move different songs to different stations. I'm putting in on the site so you can check it out.

http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/

I will also put it on my side links too so you can access it whenever.

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.

What is Personalization?

According to Wikipedia, personalization is "tailoring a consumer product, electronic or written medium to a user based on personal details or characteristics they provide." Personalization allows you to create a Web site that is specific to those who access the site.

Web personalization models include rules-based filtering, based on "if this, then that" rules processing, and collaborative filtering, which serves relevant material to customers by combining their own personal preferences with the preferences of like-minded others.

Rules-based filtering is "programming that makes use of pattern-directed invocation of procedures from assertions and goals."Rules-based filtering seems extremely hard to explain because a lot of it has to do with mathematical equations. I am assuming that this is primarily the type of personalization that Pandora uses because the site looks for patterns in each individual song's sound, and base their recommendations on these patterns.

On the other hand, collaborative filtering (CF) is the method of making automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users (collaborating). The underlying assumption of CF approach is that: Those who agreed in the past tend to agree again in the future. For example, a collaborative filtering or recommendation system for music tastes could make predictions about which music a user should like given a partial list of that user's tastes (likes or dislikes).

Pandora does not base its recommendations on other user's likes and dislikes, but rather bases them on the employee's analysis of each song. However, Last.fm does use collaborative filtering because all of their recommendations are bases on what other users are listening to.

Case Study: Web Personalization

Last year a professor at Stockton introduced me to a website called Pandora.com. What I found on the website was something rather remarkable, I could enter in a song I liked and the computer would try and guess (based on the music / style of my choice) what other music I might enjoy. Even though pandora is pretty bad at making these choices, I found the website interesting because no other place in the world could do such a thing in such a short amount of time.

The Internet allows for a world of personalized choices. Instead of digging strenuously in a large, unspecific, and uncorrelated world, I can go online and visit website's that are geared toward pleasing the specific individual accessing the site. Things like pandora, LAUNCH.com, and amazon.com's user request lists all play a vital role in this phenomenon. Through the internet, people can gain access to an entire plethora of personalized features, as well as produce information that might do the same for others. It is this phenomenon I would like to explore for my case study.

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