Don't Be Afraid to Open the Box

If you are a music lover, and you haven't tried Pandora radio yet, you need to. Right now. Pandora is a fantastic radio station that will forever change the way you listen to music. Pandora is a free, interactive Internet radio station, where you, the listener, have complete control over what is played. It takes less than a minute to register to begin an epic musical journey that never ends. The people at Pandora stay busy, adding new music to their library everyday, never resting in their quest to bring you, the listener, the greatest auditory experience on the Web. For an example of how Pandora works, right click on the artist of your choice below, and open the page as a new window or tab. You can listen to your new station while you read my blog...
Ben Harper_Radio
Shakira_Radio
Miles Davis_Radio
Frank Sinatra_Radio
Spoon_Radio
Brother Ali_Radio
Willie Nelson_Radio
Prince_Radio
Metallica_Radio
If you like the song that is playing, give it a thumbs up by dragging the mouse over the album cover. If you don't like the song, give it a thumbs down, the song will go away, and another song will play. (If you are still a little confused about how to use Pandora, this tutorial might help.) Free music, endless variety, new music, what's not to love? Pandora has received rave reviews across the board. According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com,

If you don’t agree that this is the coolest application you’ve seen in a long while, re-read this post over and over until you agree, because you are wrong. I am in love with Pandora. It’s like the Internet was invented so that Pandora could be.

I have only been listening to Pandora for a few days, and already the way I listen to music has been changed forever. I have heard new songs from my favorite artists, and I have been exposed to old and new music that I had no idea existed. I am a fan. What is not to love?

Opening Pandora's Box

How did this fabulous technology come to be? Pandora was created by a group of musicians who set out on a quest to make music more accessible, to make the boundaries between the newest music and a listener like me vanish. As I type this, I am listening to "Don't Talk" by the Dudes, a band that I have never heard of. I can learn all about them by clicking on their album. Now I am listening to a funkalicious P Funk song, and I am learning all about how an old favorite, P-Funk

pursued band-format psychedelic rock. Parliament engaged in a funk free-for-all, blending influences from the godfathers (James Brown and Sly Stone) with freaky costumes and themes inspired by '60s acid culture and science fiction.

I have learned more about music through Pandora than I have through a lifetime of listening to music. Why is this? The Music Genome Project is what makes all of this possible. As I listen to the my radio station, and a song I like comes on, I immediately click on the album. Even if it is a band I know, I can always learn something new about the music by reading what Pandora has to say about the band, and the album. It makes my enjoyment of the song that much richer- to read about the music as I listen to it. Pandora has revolutionized the way I listen to music. As with many revolutionary applications on the Web, Pandora started as a great idea...

David Hornik, on Venture Blog,talks about the fascinating history of Savage Beast, founded by Tim Westergren. Hornik actually helped Westergren structure Savage Beast, and has been a close friend of Westergren as Savage Beast morphed into Pandora. According to Hornik,

Savage Beast was built upon the premise that if you could describe a piece of music in terms of its constituent parts, you could do a better job of finding music that was similar to that particular piece of music. Tim devised a way to categorize music (working with some Stanford music professors) that he called the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome is a set of about 400 characteristics that best describe the nature of a piece of music. As Tom Conrad, Savage Beast's CTO, describes it, the Music Genome captures standard things like tempo, key, etc. but also captures more subtle things like guitar picking style or "how much cowbell" (which, of course, you can never have enough of).

Pandora's new technology works well. Not perfectly, however. I often have to give a song a thumbs down. The first radio station I created, Manu Chao radio, still plays a lot of Ska despite my constant thumbs-down of most Ska songs that are played. Apparently, Pandora interprets my liking of Manu Chao as liking of horns. Maybe Pandora should give me an option: do I like Manu for his Ska-like tendencies or for his multi-cultural, multi-lingual, political lyrics?

Of all the reviews I read for Pandora, most folks had a similar take as I do. We love Pandora, but there are a few things we would change. A review on Cnet gave it a 7.7 out of 10, lamenting the lack of instant playback and the limits of the algorithmic system. Cnet observes that

this is an imperfect system, since it's hard--if not impossible--to build a perfect set of 'sounds like' algorithms. For instance, creating a station for Gillian Welch will render a plethora of the expected folk/country-tinged singer-songwriter ballads, but annoyingly, almost all of them will be by women. Presumably, a listener who likes Gillian Welch would also like, say, Will Oldham, Bob Dylan, Vic Chestnut, and so on--you get the point.

Apparently this failure to diversify upon an existing algorithm can be rectified by adding an artist to an existing radio station. However, the average user might not realize this necessity to further broaden their music choices, and, in not doing so, won't be exposed to a large amount of music that they might love.

My biggest beef with Pandora is the lack of world music. Some might notice the absence of classical music, which the folks at Pandora are currently working to add to the mix. I however, bemoan the lack of African, Middle-Eastern, Gypsy, Eastern-European, and the many many other genres of world music that I love to listen to. According to the FAQ section of the Pandora website,

Q: Do you have world music?

At this time, our current library is almost entirely composed of music with predominantly English lyrics. However, we have recently added a fairly substantial collection of Latin and Brazilian music.

Genres now represented in our collection include Pop, Rock, Jazz, R&B, Hip-hop/Rap, Country, Folk, Electronica/Dance, New Age/Ambient and Latin/Brazilian.

Our ongoing goal is to include more music from around the world such as music with French and German lyrics, J-Pop, Indian Raga, tribal music from Africa and South America, and much more.

We realize this may take a while, but we have every intention of providing the same quality of listening and discovery experience for as much of the world's music as possible.

I am glad that Pandora is working on it. Unit then, I urge you to check out KEXP's incredible archived shows. Their Best Ambiance(African), Positive Vibrations (Reggae) and World Pop shows are the best way to hear fantastic music from all over the world.

The lack of world music is a drawback to Pandora. I also wonder about the availability of independent music. According to Pandora, they accept music from anybody and listen to everything that they get. According to their FAQ page, once they get a music submission,

2. WE LISTEN. We love music, and we understand that many excellent records are out there just waiting to be discovered. We listen to everything that we receive. Period.

3. WE DECIDE. Sadly, we cannot add every CD that we receive to the Music Genome Project. Our Senior Music Analysts (who are all excellent musicians and artists themselves, and also all-around cool people) are responsible for auditioning your submissions for inclusion. To some extent, musicianship matters, and so does aiming your material successfully at your intended audience. But mainly, what matters is artistic focus and excellence. We want to share your music with people who will love it!

Since I am new to Pandora, the jury is still out as to whether or not Pandora supports independent musicians. The two that I know are not on Pandora. If you are concerned about supporting independent artists, check out KEXP! Other than the lack of world music and my question about independent artisits, I heart Pandora. Most people agree. SharkJumping, Sean Ryan's digital media, casual gaming and technology blog, believes that Pandora offers an excellent radio service.

I think the Pandora service is easy to use since it's all Flash based, it offers a high quality MP3 stream, and that it offers a greater degree of customization down to the song level than almost any radio service I know.

Now That The Box is Open, it Can Never be Closed...
Pandora's quest to bring us the ultimate listening experience has not been won without a few battles. A recent copyright court ruling on royalty payments for songs played on the web threatened to kill Internet radio. On this webcast, Pandora founder, Tim Westergren, spoke about how the changes could effect his and many similar operations around the country.

The threat of the ruling was dire, and the future of all Internet radio was at stake. Westergren took his appeal public to keep Pandora alive:


Luckily, Internet radio won the battle and,for now, things look bright for the future of Pandora and other Internet radio stations. In August, Internet music broadcasters won a huge battle in the ongoing war with Sound Exchange, an independent, nonprofit organization designated by the U.S. Copyright Office to collect royalty fees for music played digital cable and satellite television music, internet and satellite radio.

This summer the Copyright Board pushed for rate hikes that would have put many large webcasters out of business due to royalty fees that far exceeded webcasting revenue, but the newly agreed upon rates have both a floor and a ceiling of $500 and $50,000, respectively — numbers far more manageable for most webcasters. To give you an example, popular online music services such as Yahoo! Music, Live 365 and Last.FM could have owed hundreds of thousands of dollars a year if the rate hikes went into effect.

The Butterfly Flew Out At Last
What is next for Pandora? The sky seems to be the limit, now that Pandora seems to be free of the oppressive tactics of the powers that be. Now that Pandora has made deals with Microsoft, and Amazon, and is compatible with the major Internet browsers, it seems that there is no end in site. Pandora is even branching out into the electronics market. Now you can buy hardware for listening to Pandora away from your computer directly from the website. In this video, the Zing CEO Tim Bucher talks about the appearance of Pandora radio on a prototype of a new WiFi-connected device, and Tom Conrad unveils the re-design of the Pandora interface. It's a completely new look for Pandora.


Battles won, lucrative deals secure, and new music to catalog. Things look good for Pandora... until the next, best thing. I wonder what that could possibly be?

Right now a song, "Don't forget to miss me" by Henry Manx is playing. It is the second time I have heard this song, and I love it. It features

folk roots
mild rhythmic syncopation
acoustic sonority
repetitive melodic phrasing
extensive vamping
major key tonality
an acoustic guitar solo
a good dose of acoustic guitar pickin'
acoustic rhythm guitars

and these are just a few of the hundreds of attributes cataloged for this song by the Music Genome Project.