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Pandora and the future of music in a post-record label world
(Notes from the Pandora meet up held at the Alamo Drafthouse on Monday.)
As the theater at the Alamo Drafthouse filled to capacity and rows were shuffled to create room for late arriving Pandora fans, I felt a growing sense of amazement. This was, after all, a Monday night meet up to discuss a Web site. A Web site. Austin’s well-known for being a high-tech Mecca, but could there really be that many nerdy code pilots like myself, ever intrigued by growing Internet trends, or was this about something else entirely? As the crowd continued to pour in, I began to strongly suspect the latter.
For those who have yet to discover it, Pandora is a free online listening service, built around an ingenious, totally unique model. Essentially, Pandora users can create radio stations built around artists or songs that they like. For example, I have a Pandora station called “John Legend radio.” The station plays some John Legend tracks, but it also plays tracks which share similar characteristics to the songs in Legend’s catalog, potentially giving me hours of neo-soul crooning both from established stars and up-and-comers. As founder Tim Westergren, a musician himself, explained on Monday night, Pandora was developed to help customers discover new music.
On the surface, Pandora’s structure seems similar to the Amazon.com “Customers who bought this, also bought this” model, but it’s actually significantly more complex. At the root of Pandora is the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project strives to “capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level” by breaking it down based on an extensive list of musical characteristics. At Pandora central 50 analysts, themselves musicians, listen to music all day, cataloging roughly 400 traits of each song that comes across their desks. The traits in question cover everything from tempo (the most heavily weighted trait) to how many notes in the alto sax solo. It takes 15 to 45 minutes per song to perform this analysis, but when it’s done the massive amount of data collected allows the Pandora data engine to place each song alongside its musical neighbors, songs that share many characteristics.
Also — and this is important — Pandora’s system puts no weight on a song’s popularity or an artist’s commercial success, and instead analyzes tracks entirely on musical data. According to Westergren, a whopping 70 percent of artists featured on Pandora are unsigned. Westergren also claims that 40 percent of Pandora listeners say that they started buying more music after discovering Pandora. (Pandora users can click through to Amazon or iTunes to purchase tracks or albums while listening.) Westergren says he regularly hears success stories from indie musicians who notice a spike in their iTunes sales after their music was added to Pandora.
And therein, I suspect, is the explanation for the huge crowd at the Alamo. Pandora is not yet a profitable venture, but the company is now stable and potential new revenue streams are starting to look good. Like most of us who are excited about the potential of streaming Internet radio, Pandora founders are eagerly awaiting the day when broadband streams are ubiquitous enough to make Web radio mobile. The day when devices that allow you to stream on the go and, for example, plug Pandora into your car stereo, become commonplace, the entire equation of FM/AM/satellite radio changes. Pandora already has 11 million registered users and between 22,000-23,000 listeners a day. They are striving to become a leading global radio network at a time when FM radio has become frustratingly homogenized and record labels are sputtering. In the post-big record label world, a service like Pandora could become a force to be reckoned with, and the early adopters who crowded the Alamo seemed eager to be part of the movement.
To add your band’s music to Pandora send a copy of your CD to Pandora’s main office at:
360 22nd Street Suite 440 Oakland CA 94612
According to Westergren, about 30 percent of music received by Pandora actually makes it into the player and it takes about 6-8 weeks for the Pandora analysts to process the music that they do accept.
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