Pandora

Today I got a chance to meet Tim Westergren, one of the founders and CEO of Pandora. If you've never heard of Pandora, you should check it out. It's kinda like Internet radio, but you can define the kind of music you end up hearing. Starting with a song of your choice, it plays a string of songs that have a similar sound and feel to the original. It's a really great way of discovering new music, and it's pretty much all I listen to these days.

Listening to Tim talk, I was really surprised to find out Pandora works. They've got this huge database of music they call the Music Genome Project, and they use it to group together similar songs. This database has over 100,000 songs, and the crazy part is, each and every one of them is categorized by hand. They've got a group of people with a good music theory background that just do nothing but listen to songs and fill out around 200 characteristics about them. He said that a person can usually finish a song in 20 minutes, so the amount of work that's gone into this thing is huge. I can't help but think there's some way you could build a computer program to do this analysis, but then I bet the analysis would be pretty crappy. Their whole process is pretty labor intensive, but the quality is top notch.

I'm also surprised by the whole legal aspect of Pandora. All they have to do to get new songs is to go out and buy the CDs. Then, they're free to put them up on Pandora. Apparently, this is perfectly legal under the DMCA, and anyone could do it. What they can't do is play a particular song on demand. They also can't rewind, and have restrictions on how often you can skip songs, and how often you can hear songs from a particular artist. I guess if you're able to do those things, then there's no need for you to buy music at all. They compare themselves to the radio, and are trying to put themselves out as a music recommendation service.

I think they've got a good idea going, but I'm just unsure about their financial future. I'm not sure how much ads will get them, and I don't know if it's a service people would subscribe to and pay for just yet. It reminds me of satellite radio. Sure, satellite radio has hundreds of channels and no commercials, while normal radio sucks ass with crappy stations and 10 minute long commercial breaks. But whether or not it's something I'd subscribe to... I dunno. For something like Pandora, the recommendations are great, but I'd like the ability to hear those new songs I like a few more times, just something to justify the fact that you'd be paying for it. Otherwise you'll forget what you heard, and end up with nothing.