How to give users what they want: Pandora.com
While most companies are looking for new ways to add DRM to their products or launching increasingly restrictive online media services, a select few are taking a radical approach: giving the people what they want.
Pandora.com is a new online music service. Users who visit the web page type in a band or song they like and Pandora uses that as a starting point to find more music that the users might enjoy. The creators of Pandora have spent the last six years creating a detailed catalog of music they call the Music Genome Project. Using this information, they are able find new songs you might like based on your existing favorites:
Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.
This idea might sound like a gimmick, but it works incredibly well. Just point your browser to pandora.com and type in a song or artist you enjoy. Pandora will create a “station” for that style of music and within moments you will be listening to music. Pandora has a huge selection of music to pull from and does quite well at identifying tastes after a few hours of play. You can create up to 100 different stations to fit your different moods and tastes. Hook your stereo up to your computer and you are in for hours of musical joy.
Pandora has been getting rave reviews across the web. It works on pretty much any computer that has a web browser and Flash, is free for unlimited use, and actually pays the artists for the music that is played. Users around the web are sharing tips and tricks and finding new uses all the time. Check it out.
technorati tags:pandora, mp3, streaming, music, genome
4 Comments so far
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Don’t get me wrong, I love Pandora, but there is plenty of “uninnovate” in there too. Most of it driven by laws, not the designers, but very much present in the product. When you request a song, it won’t play immediately, you can’t rewind, if you skip too many songs per hour you get cut off from the service until you slip below the threshold, etc.
All of this is I believe designed to allow them to get license as a “radio” station, the closer it gets to play on demand the more it looks like they are selling songs. It might not be their fault, but it’s still uninnovation. Their trick though is that they’ve found an innovative way to deal with the uninnovative restrictions. Still this could be so much better in a world of less restrictions on music.
You have a valid point. There are some limitations in the software so they can fall under radio licensing. But imagine if Amazon or Microsoft had made this. It would require a custom ActiveX control to play, would work only in IE 6.0 on Windows XP SP2, and probably would cost $5 a month to use.
Right now there is no cost and the sign-up is quick and non-invasive. A user that wishes to break the license agreement can easily download a program to rip the songs as MP3s and there is no DRM preventing that. It’s not perfect as you said, but is in a whole different category than most of the stuff that gets pushed on consumers these days.
The question is do we accept some limitations or always insist on a perfect situation? I think consumers should always push back against restrictive technology, but in this case the limitations are reasonable given that it is a free service designed with radio as a model. If you had to pay to use it, I might have a different opinion about the artificial restrictions. But given this model, I applaud the guys behind Pandora for providing a great service.
I’ve tried Pandora and found that I don’t like the service. The reason is that it’s using song similarity to find things that sound similar. It didn’t take long for Pandora to send me from prog-rock interests to pop music I hated.
What I’m after is things that I might like, but not necessarily that sound similar. I think Last.fm is a better attempt to accomplish the same task. It’s based on looking at people who have overlapping, but not entirely overlapping, musical interests. By using a group of “neighbors” it gets things you may not be aware of but are likely to enjoy, and doesn’t go down the “Britney Spears” trap that Pandora can fall into.
Like all good things in life, you have to pass hours on it. I use it at work or at home and I’ve quickly had a precise station that make me hear what I’ve choosen. You have to let their services clearly identify your request. With the fuckin’ huge music database they got, I think it’s normal… I’ve now 12 stations. Amon them I’ve built 3 different Hip-Hop stations : Old School, East Coast, West Coast. It’s working great and the mistakes are very rares. When it happends it’s so easy to rectify it. I’m voluntarily not objective cuz I love Pandora. I thought I will find only main stream and commercial music but they have surprised me. So good !!!