Technology, Culture, Commentary on the Internet Revolution

Tim Westergren of Pandora at Indiana University

by Jason on October 5th, 2006

One of the areas of our earth that has emerged is online music and offline music. We’ve moved from having a “b-side” on the back of a 45rpm, to a CD of a dozen or so songs. What normally came with those dozen songs were a few that you weren’t really interested in, but just came with the album that had the song on it you really wanted.

Today, all you have to do is buy the one song you’re interested in and you know you like, then build your own personal playlist and maybe even burn your own mix album. Of course burning your own mix album can only occur if the broken-more-often-than-not DRM schemes don’t keep you from enjoying the music you paid for the way you would prefer to enjoy it.

There’s something lost in the method above of just buying the song you know you like, how do you get introduced to other songs you might like if you listened to them. In the past you’d just listen to the radio and something new would come across the speakers. But nowadays, listening to the plain old radio is just so old school. Now it needs to be XM or Sirius, and that’s only if you’re not plugged into your own personal radio station coming from your iPod or other portable music player.

Personal Radio Station? Now there would be a good idea, which is why it’s already happened, and it’s called Pandora, which was started by Tim Westergren.

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you’ll love. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we’ll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe.

We take your input (artists, songs) and feedback (”I like this”, “I don’t like this”) and use the Music Genome Project to create stations that play songs that are musically similar to what you’ve told us. That’s it; only the music counts. We don’t care how popular the artist is, who’s backing them, and we don’t care which genre bin they usually belong in. Only the music matters.

Musical DNA, that’s what we’re talking about when we say “Music Genome Project”. As stated above, they don’t care who the music is coming from, they’re only concerned about the sound: tone, speed, volume, range, rhythm. It’s quite impressive what the system can do and how it introduces you to music you may have never ventured to out on your own. And the reason you may have never found it is because the “masses” may not think it was that good, or you may just have never ever heard of the artist before. Two things that don’t stand in the way for Pandora.

If this sounds interesting to you, the founder, Tim Westergren, will be speaking at a session entitled “Pandora and the Future of Music:

• WHAT: PANDORA AND THE FUTURE OF MUSIC
• WHEN: Tuesday, October 17th at 6 pm
• WHERE: Indiana University Memorial Union
  Frangipani Room 900
  East 7th Street
  Bloomington, IN 47405
• Among the questions we hope to tackle:
  -How is technology changing the nature of radio?
  -How important are community and peers when it comes to discovering music online? What’s the best way to foster community?
  -Can services like Pandora help create a larger middle class of artists who aren’t superstars, but have enough of an audience to support themselves through their music? Do music lovers want more music discovery?

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