You may be a little slow to keep up with the ever-bending technological curve, but if you gobble up any/everything that makes your life easier because of technology, then you’ve probably heard of Pandora. This website is more than just an internet radio phenomenon; it redefines the entire idea of radio. Pandora is a completely internet-based phenomenon, and makes itself stand out from the rest of the internet counterparts by making its service interactive, which is where it differs from producer-to-receiver internet radio. But before we get into how it works, you should probably know how this website came into fruition, silly.
The Music Genome Project, according to its website, was formed on January 6, 2000, when a big group of musicians and “music-loving technologists” (what is that? ohhh) banded together to fit every record they owned with certain tags, or attributes that can be used to describe the music, in an effort to make the most comprehensive collection of music ever. The groups of people giving these records their tags, or “genes,” as they so called them, decided to make an interactive music website that allowed users to begin with an artist that they liked and rate it, thereby picking the songs and artists that followed according to their picks. Boiled down for your understanding, Pandora is a customizable playlist generated by the types of genes you tell the service you like or don’t like. The more you listen, the more specific the songs get, since the program almost “figures out” your music taste. The music technologists (still can’t get over that) have already given over 10,000 songs upwards of 400 genes, and they additionally claim that it takes 20 minutes to analyze a single song (found it on the biggest FAQ EVER). That right there is a lot of man hours.
Let’s do a walkthrough, why don’t we. I went onto the website and got a free account (the only advantages of paying for a subscription is that there won’t be ads, which aren’t really that intrusive to begin with, and a standalone player… I can live without that) and set up a channel that started with a specific artist. For the sake of newsworthiness, I chose Britney Spears, since she’s all over the internets and such with her rehab and hair-buzzing escapades (sorry to use you as an example Brit, I’ll make it up to you one day…). The song that started off the pop-a-thon was “Lonely,” a kind of lame funk track twisted into a glittery pop confection, from her album Britney. I didn’t like it, so I gave it a thumbs down. The next track that popped up (no pun intended, really) was by Cascada called “Everytime We Touch,” a song that all the bridge-and-tunnel peeps would definitely be caught grinding to up on 21st and 10th. I kind of like the pretty melodies (let’s be real, I have to like something, and I’ve heard this enough to begrudgingly click the thumbs up button), so low and behold, another Britney track comes up, but it’s something that sounds more like Cascada’s jam. It’s a remix to “Toxic,” done by Peter Rauhofer (called the Reconstruction Mix, which it most definitely is, since it sounds like he took the original out back and mangled it). Ok, I hate it. But at least Pandora picked a song that had that same gross trance bounce. Next song.
Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater”!!! If you’ve ever read my other blog about her (let's be real, k? I know you haven't. Warning: it has profanity), you might have learned that I think Furtado has sacrificed any scrap of morality she ever had. But for the sake of nostalgia, and the fact that I loved “I’m Like A Bird,” I’ll give it the thumbs up. In creeps BS’s “I’m A Slave 4 U,” which I must say I’ve always had a soft spot for. We’ll just keep that between us, and skip right ahead to the next jam. Ugh, a new one from Jessica Simpson’s latest? Next. But wait, something happened. Pandora popped up a little message stating that due to legal issues, I’m not allowed to skip a certain amount of songs an hour. I guess that’s the downside of not getting an account. The upside, though, is that you can easily create a new channel and start with the same artist, yet yield different results. Simply divine.
But now it’s time for analysis. Sure, it was fun to listen to Britney and have a reason to do it, but Pandora was on to something. They knew when I liked a certain type of sound, and knew what types I didn’t. Since I had started out with a Britney song I didn’t like, then ended up with a Cascada track that I did, Pandora automatically went back to a Britney song that had the same trance bounce as in the Cascada song. I didn’t like the Britney track, but it moved on to a Nelly Furtado song that was pop in the same way that Britney usually is. So they went back to BS, and I ate it up. Pandora started to get a little to ahead of itself by thinking that I would like Jessica Simpson, but on average, the Pandora listener would probably like a Simpson track, so I think that they would probably have hit the nail on the head in 95% of cases.
Pandora is clearly working. By taking genre labels and creating a customizable radio playlist for you, Pandora is both entertaining you and making radio into an interactive media format. The service, which surely thrives off of its big square advertisements that hang in the upper-right corner of your screen, offers you something that you don’t have: a machine to suggest music that it would think you like. The benefits are for everyone involved: Pandora makes money off of advertisements and subscriptions (in addition to the information that they most likely sell to record labels about your choices), the user gets to listen to music for free and additionally gets to find out about artists they have never heard of, and the artists who get played get exposure and more fans to buy their records and merchandise. Who could get hurt from such a nice service?
The answer, my internet friends, is no one. This is a completely legitimate service that, in this internet-based age, could thwart the standard forms of radio. Many big radio stations play a large assortment of music (kind of like how a Z100 or PLJ plays R&B, ‘90s and pop in a big slushy mix), leaving listeners to cruise the channels when a song they don’t like comes on. But in the case of Pandora, listeners can determine whether or not they like a song on the spot, and if they do not want to hear the track, they can easily skip to the next one that Pandora has hand-picked according to their gene-mapping. The downsides, of course, are there, if you’re a big music dork and look for artists of which you haven’t heard, since there are only 10,000 artists. Also, the inability to switch more than approximately 10 songs per hour is a major downside, but that’s how they ring you in to buy a subscription. So what’s the verdict? Pandora can only change the future of how we listen to music and alter the way that radio is perceived by audiences. If you want to both listen to free music, have an intelligent computer figure out your tastes, and turn you on to good music, well then, it’s onnnnllllyyyy a clicccccck awayyyyy (note: musicals do not appear on Pandora, so I guess you’ll have to hop onto Amazon for that one).
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