MixedContent

I’ve written a few times about Pandora and the Music Genome Project, but I thought I would finally give the review I alluded to earlier.

If you have not heard of the extremely ambitious Music Genome Project or Pandora before, the idea is to pay professional musicologists to listen to and mark up the entire history of popular music according to a predifined set of musical criteria (such as rhythm, timbre, tonality, etc). Pandora offers a web based music player that mines this collected data to pick accurate musical recommendations based on a purely algorithmic approach, or so the theory goes.

The broad philosophical question raised by this is if music can be broken down successfully to it’s atomic parts, and still retain enough of its original meaning and intent for successful recommendations. Music is created and exists in a messy, chaotic, social environment, so what happens when it is yanked free from its surroundings and dissected under a microscope? For starters, some surprisingly interesting musical choices are made, such as a James Brown track following the Indigo Girls. While both songs happened to feature similar rhythmic elements, and ‘major tonality’ (language taken from the Pandora music client), one group happens to have a strong feminist following while the other is a convicted wife beater. I happen to like both artists, but I just wanted to use this as an example of how social context can play an important role in successful music recommendation.

On a technical level, I really think this is a neat idea though. The flash client is fairly easy to use, and it’s fun to listen to music selections free from record company hype. There are surprises, but I did manage to find some artists that I like that had not heard about before; all one can ask for in a music recommendation system. I found it mildly irritating that I couldn’t replay a song or bookmark a song again to play later, but I bet this is mostly due to licensing issues.

Over all, I was impressed with the service, but I know that the thing to do is to combine their expertly created, pristine musical database with the purely social dataset of last.fm. Pandora plans on charging a reasonable $3 a month for this service, but I would rather pay double for an API that I can incorporate into other applications.

Tom, thanks for the early access. Can’t wait to see what the next step is!

– Update –
Scoble tries. Scoble likes.