{"id":580,"date":"2007-10-13T15:55:21","date_gmt":"2007-10-13T20:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2007\/10\/13\/opened-pandora\/"},"modified":"2007-10-13T17:01:36","modified_gmt":"2007-10-13T22:01:36","slug":"opened-pandora","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2007\/10\/13\/opened-pandora","title":{"rendered":"Opened Pandora"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><hints id=\"hah_hints\"><\/hints><\/p>\n<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.ericgoldman.org\/archives\/2007\/10\/pandora_founder.htm\">Eric Goldman&#8217;s recent recommendation<\/a>, I decided to give <a href=\"http:\/\/pandora.com\/\">Pandora<\/a> another shot. The short version: Pandora is an intelligent predictive personalized Internet radio service with an arguably sustainable and protectable business model. And by &#8220;intelligent,&#8221; I mean there are real human brains at work.  As Eric <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.ericgoldman.org\/archives\/2007\/10\/pandora_founder.htm#trackbacks\">explains<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Pandora&#8217;s main competitive differentiator is its &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Music_Genome_Project\">Music Genome Project<\/a>.&#8221; 50 trained musicians with at least a college degree in music (called &#8220;music analysts&#8221;) listen to songs all day long and rate each song on 400 different musical attributes. See the <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/public\/article\/SB112784146741053451-FYfrFWfQ29np0rdqx33NDS8LtWM_20051105.html?mod=tff_article\">2005 WSJ article<\/a> discussing them. By profiling songs this way, the system can predict that a person who likes an artist&#8217;s song might like other songs with similar musical attributes. From listening to Pandora for many, many hours, IMO the system isn&#8217;t perfect, but it does a pretty good job, and it has definitely hooked me on music that I wouldn&#8217;t have listened to otherwise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>They have apparently cataloged approximately half a million songs and the database continues to grow apace. There is also a collaborative-filtering aspect, similar to Netflix and Amazon. I suspect this hybrid between the &#8220;wisdom of crowds&#8221; and the &#8220;wisdom of experts&#8221; will be the future of most large content projects (including wikipedia).<\/p>\n<p>My first few hours have returned excellent results. I created a for-working &#8220;station&#8221; called, lazily, &#8220;The Bad Plus Radio&#8221; (described as &#8220;Avant garde and angular funk\/jazz, but not so dissonant that you can&#8217;t do mind-taxing work while listening&#8221;). <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pandora.com\/?sc=sh1651822991118615\">You are welcome to listen as well<\/a>.  (See also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pandora.com\/people\/adam8303\">my Pandora Profile<\/a>.)  The &#8220;artist seeds&#8221; for the channel include the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2005\/10\/06\/bad_plus_rocks\/\">The Bad Plus (of course)<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Bill Frisell<\/li>\n<li>John McLaughlin<\/li>\n<li>Medeski Martin &amp; Wood<\/li>\n<li>Thievery Corporation<\/li>\n<li>Bred Mehldau<\/li>\n<li>Oliver Nelson<\/li>\n<li>Ornette Coleman<\/li>\n<li>Keith Jarrett<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Pandora has played several tracks by these artists, but is increasingly mixing in other artists that match up on some axis of preference. I&#8217;ve thumbed-up and thumbed-down several tracks from beyond the &#8220;seed&#8221; set (and will continue to do so), thus driving the predictive engine.  I look forward to creating some entirely different channels and publishing the URLs here.<\/p>\n<p>Although supposedly the &#8220;free&#8221; version is ad-supported, I haven&#8217;t heard any ads yet. Maybe that is still to come. In any case, it is probably worth the $36\/year subscription cost.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond the specific content I&#8217;m enjoying here, it is nice to see a Web 2.0 (or pick your favorite version) business model that doesn&#8217;t require a leap of faith to see how it can work.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, they have a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pandora.com\/static\/pandora_facebook.html\">Facebook app<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via Eric Goldman&#8217;s recent recommendation, I decided to give Pandora another shot. The short version: Pandora is an intelligent predictive personalized Internet radio service with an arguably sustainable and protectable business model. And by &#8220;intelligent,&#8221; I mean there are real human brains at work. As Eric explains: Pandora&#8217;s main competitive differentiator is its &#8220;Music Genome [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18,11,43,6,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}