Feed those big ears

Pandora is an internet radio station designed to help you find new music that you like, based on music that you already know you like. It’s based on the Music Genome Project, a colossal effort by a group of musicians to figure out what makes us like the tunes we like. From Pandora’s web site:

“… our team of thirty musician-analysts have been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more - close to 400 attributes! We continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country.

“Pandora™ is the doorway to this vast trove of musical information. With Pandora you can explore to your heart's content. Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings - new and old, well known and completely obscure - to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice.”

Pandora has done no advertising, and yet through word of mouth has attracted more than 3 million registered listeners. They're adding 15,000 per day. 

I went to a Pandora Town Hall meeting a few days ago; founder Tim Westergren is going around the country to meet Pandora users and get and give feedback on the product. He’s been at this since 2000, and has survived two rounds of venture capital fund-raising as well as long stretches without salary while the VC dance went on. All the while they’ve been building the genome and tweaking the radio interface to make it more responsive.

The music in their collection is incredibly extensive. According to Tim, all the major labels combined release about 6,000 new albums each year, and they don’t have any trouble running through those. They hunt for new music all over the place, even accepting albums from artists and bands. (They’re also looking for musicians to sit in their office and analyze music for six hours a day, so if you’re a player in San Francisco looking for a day job, give them a shout.) 

Whether you’re in San Francisco or not, Pandora is definitely worth a visit. You can build as many radio stations as you like, just by telling Pandora a few songs or artists that you like. Once the Genome starts playing songs for you, you can give the songs a thumbs up or a thumbs down, skip them, or say “don’t play this for a month.” And there you go -  an endless supply of free music you're probably going to like. Who could ask for anything more?