Pandora Radio and the Music Genome Project

listener mail. This listener mail comes from Justin. He says, Hi, guys, I'm fourteen and love the show. Don't worry, I'm making sure this isn't long like some of your others. So how does Pandora Internet radio work like with the amount of skips and stuff? Thanks for the show, it's awesome, Justin, Well, thank you, Justin. We decided we're going to talk about Pandora Radio and the underlying structure behind it, the Music Genome Project, because it's pretty cool. Yeah, the Music Genome

Project is pretty key to this whole thing. Um. Because there are a number of different kinds of internet radio stations out there. Pandora is just one of them. Uh, some of the other's famous ones that people are probably pretty familiar with. Our last dot FM or group, shark Um Radio one Lama maybe that one is not familiar to me, Fine Tune, and of course Spotify, which we

have yet to see in the United States. And then there's some others that are not internet radio stations but also will deliver music to you via the web, things like La La oh wait, that's gone well La La went bye bye and went to La La Land. I went to apple Land is what I went to. Well, that's true at any rate, So internet radio. The interesting thing about Pandora is that it kind of sprung out of the idea of how do you find new music

that you're going to like? You know, not just not just finding new music, because that's that in itself is not necessarily that hard, but finding new music that kind of appeals to you based upon what you already like. That can be kind of a challenge. I mean, you walk into a music store and you look at the categories and they're pretty broad, right, like rock or rap or blues or whatever. That's These genres are huge, I mean,

they're there are sub genres in every single one of these. Yes, And just because you happen to like someone who has a great record in one genre doesn't mean that you're going to pick up any other record in that genre and be equally as enamored. So Pandora Radio kind of grew out of this idea of the Music Genome Project,

which uh uh is fascinating to me. The idea is that analysts break down a song by describing it through one of several hundred musical attributes, and the collection of attributes are kind of what give the song it's character, and that by breaking down other songs and getting their attributes, you can compare one against the other and see how similar they are, Like how many of the qualities does

one song share with another? And if there are several qualities that are shared, you could leap to the conclusion that hey, you know, if you really like, if you really dig this one song, then this other song that's kind of similar to it, you'll probably also like. There's a good chance. So uh, that's kind of how Pandora that's the basis of Pandora Radio. Yeah, I can actually get pretty messy these uh. The songs are are picked

apart by essentially by hand. Um, so of course there is a human being sitting somewhere in a room full of little bits of music all over the floor, or maybe not now. Um. It does take human beings, however, to uh who are working at Pandora to listen to a song and and basically they're they're dissecting it. They're listening to it for different things, UM, different styles of music.

They're listening for the different instrumentation. Perhaps you like piano jazz, but you you can't stand saxophones, so I mean you can. They're identifying traits like that, Um, different kinds of of singing, vocalization, maybe all instrumentals. These are all kinds of of attributes or uh facets as they like to describe them in library school, Um, of a song that they'll use to record and Um. Once you get started with Pandora, simply

by putting in, say a favorite artist or a favorite song. UM, that's really when the music genome project kicks in, because you know, it's going to try to play another song in your station based on the traits that are available for that particular song or that particular artist that you put in. Sure. Yeah, So for example, if I wanted to put in um uh say the Ramones, and I did, uh, I want to be sedated? Okay, because you know I'm

a punk rock fan. Yes you are, so if I put that in, it would the Pandora Radio would would consult the Genome project essentially the database, and say, all right, well, this guy wants he likes I want to be sedated. What qualities does that song have? You know, what kind of rhythm does it follow? Is it a male vocalist or a female vocalist? Of course in this case it's a male vocalist. Um is it a band? Is it?

Is it acoustic? Is it rock? It looks at all these different qualities and then says, all right, well, what else is in the library that kind of has this similar uh structure? And it might pull something from the clash and then play the clash and say, hey, do you like this? And then it's your choice to either give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down or you know, you don't have to do anything at all

if you don't want to. If you do a thumbs up, generally, what that's telling Pandora is that not only do you like the song, but it will start to play that heavier in rotations in the future. Now. Granted, when you first get started, it's not going to do that that often because you haven't built up your own station yet. But over time, as you thumb up or thumbdown songs, UH, certain songs will get played more often than others. Now, one of the nice things about Pandora is that you're

not limited to a particular station. So, say you have a remoone station, but you say, you know what today, I'm I really want to you know, I'm thinking back to the days when I was in high school band. I really want to listen to something symphonic. Well, you can. You can put in a favorite UH composer, say Aaron Copeland, or maybe you want to listen to music from the romantic period, you can put that in. You don't have to put your you don't have to throw away what

you've done on your remone station. You can actually create up to a hundred stations of your own. So if you have your you know, rainy day station for a mood music while you're working, or you really want something UH like industrial or hip hop, you can go ahead and switch from one to the other. And if you really want to you can mix some of them together in their quick Mix feature, which is a fairly new

feature on the site. Has been around for probably more than a year now now that I think about it, um but it was there when it started. And it's an opportunity to mash up different stations, so you can uh combine different different stations that you've already set up and it will give you a mix. So you really have a lot of options as far as customizing, and it's not it's going to keep in mind what your preferences are for a particular station, So you're starting with

a blank slate each time. Yeah, but you have the opportunity to customize and and if you want to, you can change uh your station around too, because you can edit the page for that station and if you say, come a song down that you didn't mean to, you can go, oh geez and go back to edit your page. You have to say, oh gees. By the way, that's

that's part of you wouldn't have thought. So yeah, you know, we're just going to go ahead and do that email us, but no, you can go back and edit it and say, you know, and check this one, I actually like this and um, so it's pretty nice that you can you can customize this and you don't have This is what sets Pandora apart from a lot of the other um Internet ready stations is you have this customized ability to

really make the station yours. Yeah, and and beyond that, just to kind of build on what you were saying, they're put uh, it has a couple of other options that are kind of cool to One of which is that let's say that you have maybe a dozen radio stations that you've created, and you've got them in different genres or just uh, you know, kind of for different moods, and say that you have one station open and a song starts playing, and you think, I like this song,

but it doesn't really belong in the station. It really could go in my other station, like you know, station number three. You can actually go through the menu system and port that song over into your other station. So that way, what it does is it automatically gives that song that thumbs down for the station it's currently playing in, so it won't play it again there, but it will play in your in whatever station you designated as the recipient, which is really neat because I mean, I have that

happen all the time. I've one of the stations I have is for musicals, uh hardcore punk rock rock. Okay, I like musicals actually, Frankly, he has stations for both. I'm pretty sure I do have stations for both. I have a station called I Want to be Sedated. I have a station called Broadway. I have a station called

Avenue Que, which is slowly, slowly taking over Broadway. I could, I could, but at any rate, sometimes the Broadway thing, like, I haven't told Pandora specifically or there's no you know, I haven't gone through the genre system, which you can also do. They have a thing where you can select music by genre if you want to just leave it more as a more broad uh spectrum. But I haven't told Pandora of course that, you know, I just want

music that it's from musicals, so occasionally. You know, there are a lot of different styles of musicals out there, right, I mean, some of them are, you know, the kind of big melodramatic stuff like the Android Weber stuff with Fantom of the Opera and all that kind of thing, and then some of them are more rock and roll based. I mean, even sticking with Andrew laid whatever you go

with Jesus Christ Superstar and you've got like that seventies rock. Well, occasionally a seventies rock song will come in because it's very similar to music that's in that play. But I don't want it there because that's my musical station. This is not a musical song. It blongs somewhere else, So I'll just move it over to one of the stations it does belong in, or if I hate the song,

I'll just give it the thumbs down. Now, we were asked specifically about skipping songs and thumbs down songs and things like that, and why you're limited and what's the deal behind that. I kind of wanted to talk about one other thing first, just and and it's related. It's transitions, um, because that that is the thing I mean. Um. Actually, when I was doing a little extra research, of course,

I've been using Pandora for years. I'm pretty familiar with it, but I was trying to look for the answers to specific questions. And one of the things I kept seeing seeing on on the Pandora blow Dog was people asking why, uh, someone might upgrade. There's a paid version of Pandora called Pandora One which we could talk about in a minute. But people keep its thirty six dollars a year, and people say, why I want to pay thirty six dollars

a year? You know that's ridiculous. Well, the thing is, this music has to be licensed, um, because the artists are supposedly getting paid for songs that are getting played on internet radio stations as well as satellite radio as well as terrestrial radio. Um. The internet radio in particular has been an issue, right, internet radio royalties. It's a

performance piece. I mean, you are whereas the band itself is not performing the song, your service is performing the song in lieu of the band, and and therefore the band should be able to be compensated for that performance. Right. And it's not just the band, it's also the music label all that kind of stuff too. Studio write, the writers and the performers, and uh, as somebody registered with one of the music performance services, you know, I'm happy

to see that they're you know, paying attention to that. However, they have to license this stuff, and as part of their license there are certain terms and conditions, uh that they have to meet. One of those big ones is that you are not allowed to play a song on demand, Like, you can't just pick a song and say I want to hear this right now on Pandora, and that's what I want to hear, and that's all that I'm interested in.

Pandora's not a play for on demand service like that, So you couldn't say I want to hear meat loafs. I will do anything for love, but I won't do that because I've got twenty seven minutes to kill and I'd really like to hear some melodramatic music. Um. I mean, you could say it, but it's not gonna happen because Pandora doesn't work that way. Uh. And you also can't rewind and listen to something that you just listen to. Uh. That that's also part of the part of the agreement

with You can pause it, you just can't rewind. Um. I mean, now, if you did accidentally thumbs down a song, you can go back and give the thumbs up, but it's not gonna play it again. It's just gonna switch it in the database so that so that it will eventually play it further down. But um, yeah, these are terms that Pandora had to agree to in order to get a deal to be able to to present this

music in the first place. And for a while things were actually looking pretty grim for Pandora and other internet radio stations because they were being held to pretty extreme um conditions as far as you know how much money they had to pay uh to be able to play music. For a while, it looked like it was going to be a per performance, per person model, which means that every time someone listens to a certain song on Pandora,

Pandora would have to pay for that. Now it's more of a kind of more like a very broad spectrum where you're you're paying a lump sum in order to have the right to play certain kinds of music. So it's no longer every single time I'm the song place you pay up. It's you pay this lump sum to

the industry and then you're allowed to play the music. Yes, which is great because if it had been the other way, Pandora might not even be around anymore currently as far as the royalties situation goes, um, you can be a Pandora account holder and listen for up to forty hours a month for free, right um. If you go over that, then they'll charge you a month if you want to and for the rest of the month if you want

to keep listening. UM, or you can pay for Pandora one, which is the service I was telling you about a moment ago um which uh it's thirty six dollars a year. Gives you also some other perks. Uh. You don't see any ads on the page anymore. Um. Also you get a higher quality of audio. The normal bit rate I believe is kvps and um that goes up to one for for the higher quality, and you get um. You know that you don't have to to deal with so many Hey what do you do? And are you still listening? Um?

Hey excuse me little alerts? Yeah, where just the music just suddenly stops and then you have to go over and actively click on something so that Pandora will keep playing. Well, they don't want to be paying royalties for songs if no one is. Actually are they still doing that? Yes, they are still doing I wasn't sure I have that I have that thing going on. I haven't had I haven't had Pandora play for that long a time, and so such a long time that I haven't and I

haven't noticed it recently. And I'll listen to Pandora, but I usually end up listening, you know, in half hour stints, so I don't tend to encounter that very much. Well. Um, so as far as the skipping goes, you can skip up to I believe ten times an hour. No, six six skips per hour, twelve per day if you're a free user. If you if you're not in a particular station, now yes, uh, twelve per day, no across all stations. If you're a free list, if you're if you have

the free account. Um, yeah, because I actually went to the fact to look this up. If you're if you have a free Pandora account, you are limited to six skips per hour per station, so that that might be what you're thinking of, that six per hour per station, but total if you're a free user, now only partially wrong, right. If you're a Pandora one user, so you're paying the three six dollars a year, Uh, you don't have a

maximum number of skips that you per day. You can skip as many times as you want, but you're still limited to six per hour per station, So you can't. You can't just keep on skipping songs, you know forever. You you do run out? Now, if you have a hundred stations, and you know, you know, if you make a hundred of the same station, then you theoretically will eventually hear the songs you want to hear just by keep on skipping and then go to the next station

and continue skipping. So uh but yeah, again that's part of the licensing agreement um with the music industry. I mean, Pandora Radio has to play ball. If it doesn't, then they don't have any content. And as for content, actually I looked up again in their fact and it says currently they have around three quarters of a million songs in their database, so seven fifty thousand songs. And that's

of course across multiple genres. Oh and you know, we were talking about the whole the different qualities that songs have. I meant to mention this too. I thought it was really interesting that they don't use the full set of of of attributes for every single song, you know, they don't. They don't break it down to four categories or whatever. Uh. Certain genres have their own um attributes. So for example, rap might have East Coast versus West Coast inspired rap.

The rap songs tend to have more lyrically based criteria than you would see in other songs, because rap is very much focused on the lyrics. Yes, so depending upon the genre that you're listening to, you'll have a different set of criteria that that song is going to be uh classified us and then or you know that they used to classify that song rather and uh so that that's what they're looking at when they're going to be

pulling up the next one on the list. Uh. I I found Pandora to be pretty much the one of the coolest sites on the net. I mean, it's one of the ones that I tend to rely on whenever, you know, especially if I'm working from home. I've got Pandora on my this is like plug Orama, but I've got to Pandora Radio on my Roku and so I'll just switch it over to my Avenue Q station so I can, you know, do jazz hands between writing articles. This is almost almost not a lie. Um, So I

didn't need to know that. Um. Actually that brings up a good point. One thing that's uh. One thing they're playing ball especially has allowed Pandora to do is they've gotten themselves into a number of pretty cool partnerships. Um. Not only with with Roku, but um, of course there are applications for Android and the iPhone OS. I was so happy when they finally got the Android app out there.

That the iPhone app had been out for several months before it finally came to Android, but that I thought that was where I said, you know, these guys not only get the music classification game, they get the app game because they understand that this is where the futures headed and they got on board as fast as they possibly could, which I mean that that's shows a very forward thinking company too. Yep, yep. And there you know, it's not limited to uh to the mobile devices either.

They've got a lot of home based while Roku, but they've also got other home based appliances as well, some of the internet radio tuners that are out there in stereo systems um plus. I believe the new tvo UM

is going to have Pandora capability embedded into it. And they you know, they've done a lot to to try to reach out to different kinds of outlets, so it's not just the desktop computer um where you're going to see that, and I think they've been more successful at that than a lot of the other Internet radio stations, although um, there are others who have their own apps out and uh, you know, but they're they're not quite as as adept at making those connections, those business connections released.

They may have gotten beaten to it if Pandora's gotten exclusive, right And uh uh have you discovered any cool new artists or people you were not familiar with through pandora UM? In In some cases yes, especially as I started to explore UM jazz because it's something I've gradually been getting

into over the past couple of years. And um, so I started a couple of different jazz stations in UM Symphonic Music Stations UM and gradually have made notes of different composers and artists that that I like, um, you know, over the past couple of years, just doing that because I don't know about about you, But speaking for myself, when I'm editing articles, I find it difficult to listen to a lot of music with lyrics in it, although I can listen to music, so if I can listen

to instrumental stuff, UM, I sort of gave me an opportunity to explore those genres and you know, every once, but the problem is, uh, you can find out exactly who it is, so uh, suddenly I'll have to stop what I'm doing and go, you know, bookmark the artist, which is kind of cool. They've got you know, Facebook integration. You could share that with your your friends on Facebook. Um, and you can even purchase songs, and you can purchase songs too, which is good because you know, it's an

opportunity to learn more about music. It's not just entertainment. Yeah, there's one artist in particular that I wanted to quickly mention and this was This was from it was off my my radio station that was based off Jonathan Colton, who of course is the the Internet geek music god code Monkey himself or r E or Brains or skull Crusher Mountain, one of those three tends to be most

people's favorites. Um. I was listening to the station and there was a an artist who came up named Mark Aaron James, and uh, if you haven't heard him, I recommend checking it out if you like geeky type stuff. He has a great song called Aqua Aqua Man's Lament, which is Aqua Man singing to Vicky vale A k a,

one of Batman's love interests. And uh, that song pretty much convinced me that Pandora was the greatest thing ever, because I would have never come across this guy on my own, you know, it would have just been a you know, incredible happy accident otherwise. So, uh, and that's just one example. I mean, granted, I've heard tons and tons of different stuff. I've been introduced to shows I didn't know about through my punk rock station, I mean

avenue queue. And that's one of the benefits of doing this and and listening to stations like or you know, different internet radio stations. And I found the same kind of thing with satellite radio many years ago, is that they're you know, because they're not driven by the same interests that terrestrial radio is. You know, the standard, uh, turn on your radio and that's what you get, hundred song playlist and they're just gonna keep on shuffling through

it over and over and over again. Yeah, you just you just don't find it with those those types of stations, at least not in in this part of uh the century. It wasn't it wasn't always that way, but um so I think internet radio is really good for that, and specifically Pandora and the ability to bookmark artists and and the fact that they've got the information about them, they

carry a lot of biographical information about them. Um, you might be able to find out other artists who influenced them and explore them as well, which I think is a boon to people who really like music, especially different kinds of music, because you might find that there are

connections between musicians that you would not necessarily expect. Yeah, it's a good way of discovering all those bands that bands other bands, uh site as as big influencers that never seemed to get any real attention outside of the immediate music industry. So I mean there are hundreds of those like came to mind. The first one I think of as the Band, which you know a lot of people know about the band now, especially if you listen to stuff from the B side because they talked about

them all the time. But the band, that's that's one of those groups that all these different musicians cite as a big influence on their music. But um, in general you might say that that you know, their fame was mostly contained in the music industry. I mean, they they had more success than just that obviously, but it's a good example. Well, I guess that wraps up the discussion on Pandora Radio. Justin thanks a lot for writing in. That was a fun one for us to talk about

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