Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Pandora

A company that I think will have a big impact on the future of the music industry is Pandora. Pandora is the product of what the founders call the "Music Genome Project". Back in 2000, a bunch of musicians and technologists got together to analyze music at its most fundamental level; rhythm, melody, harmony, instrumentation, lyrics, etc. To date, they have analyzed the music of over 10,000 artists (famous to obscure).

When you go to the website, you enter the name of a song/artist that you like and a playlist is generated based on the musical characteristics of your selection. As you listen to the recommendations, you give the music a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down'. As users rate the songs, Pandora can incorpate the opinions in future recommendations. This appears to be a much more intuitive method for finding new music, as current music genres are extremely broad and not always helpful.

With the rise of digital music, I can definitely see a company in the portable music device arena acquiring Pandora in the near future and incorporating the service in the next generation of devices.
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2 comments:

Unknown said...

hi, i just wanted to say how great i found your collection of information on 2.0. its awesome to see collaboration like this going on in education. keep on, markus angermeier

March 21, 2007 at 4:43 PM
Jim McGroddy said...

Symantic Web projects like Pandora in the music space definitely do pose the threat of changing the music industry. This is evidenced by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) increasing the required royalty rates for internet radio stations.

See link:
http://www.broadcastlawblog.com/archives/
internet-radio-copyright-royalty-
board-releases-decision-rates-are-
going-up-significantly.html

These new royalty rates virtually kill the revenue model of stations like Pandora where users are allowed to create many of their own channels.

Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora says:

"This is a terribly ill-conceived attempt to crush a powerful and positive grassroots movement that is sweeping across the music world. The record labels' struggles have nothing to do with online radio and killing it will further hurt their business, not help it.

We need your help. If you'd like to get involved please write your congressperson. Below is a link to point you to the right person. If you can, please send a letter or a fax that asks for a reply (emails are too easily ignored)."

Here is the link:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/
directory/congdir.tt

March 21, 2007 at 8:09 PM

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