So my friend Andy recently turned me on to a music streaming service called Pandora. I’ve recommended it to a few friends now, who have all found it rather interesting, and I thought I’d publish it here so that more people could get an idea of what it’s all about.
It’s a music streaming service, where you input your favorite songs and end up with a personalized radio stations based on what it thinks you may also like. You then approve or disapprove of the songs it plays, and it gets a better feel for what you like and plays more good music. It takes some fiddling with, but it’s quite neat.
Plenty of other music services make recommendations of music, so what makes Pandora different? First, here’s a little background.
A long time ago I came across a plug-in for my music player (xmms) called Audioscrobbler. It looked at all the music in my playlist and indexed it on a website. It then made recommendations on what it thought I might like, based on what other people like. Basically, a lot of people who like Radiohead also like Coldplay, so perhaps I should check them out. I found this to be a neat trick, but rather unsatisfying because, frankly, people listen to crap.
Audioscrobbler morphed into last.fm, a streaming music service which does the same thing (Yahoo music also does something similar). What you end up with is basically a personalized ClearChannel radio station. Whoopee. You get all the songs from your favorite genre(s) that everybody likes, minus Green Day or any other band you dislike. You don’t get exposed to new bands or b-sides of good albums; instead, the songs you know you already like just get reinforced over and over again. Steven Krause aptly calls this the “echo chamber of overly like minds”.
Pandora works a bit differently. They have people (maybe computers?) which analyze music and index it based on certain criteria (see Music Genome Project). It then suggests music based on this information, instead of the will of the masses. This is wonderful because maybe Green Day has a song which is very much like a Radiohead or Coldplay song you like. Better yet, if a band isn’t yet popular, it still may end up on your radio station. This happens occasionally on other music services, but happens a whole lot more on Pandora (in my experience).
I greatly prefer Pandora to amassing a gigantic mp3 collection, which I’ve done in the past. Andy calls my problem “mp3 fatigue” Keeping track of my collection and organizing it into various playlists is a pain, and to my suprise I found it’s easy to get bored with a 60 gig mp3 collection. Pandora solves this problem, playing songs I forgot I liked from bands I forgot existed, and at the same time exposing me to new music. When I hear somehting I want to hear again, I jot it down and grab it later. Of course, you can always just click “buy on itunes” if you want it right away.
Anyway, try it out. Both last.fm and Pandora let you filter out junk, which makes them better than conventional radio by a long shot. Now if only you could stream to an ipod…
If this all really interests you, then take a look at the aforementioned blog of Steve Krause, which goes into way more detail on the differences and advantages of each.