Pandora's Music Box

The CD medium is one step closer to obsolesence.

I discovered Pandora's Box and it was full of music; in fact, it was chock full of almost every music selection I wanted. Pandora is a beautiful Flash application that is user-friendly and well coded. It loaded on my friends burnt-out Windows 98 machine, my Apple OSX w Safari and the more prevalent Windows XP, and it was wonderfully simple and logical in design and functionality.

Pandora's power is that it is conceptually quite phenomenal. Pandora, based on the Music Genome Project that had no lovely interface, suggests and plays music based on a single Artist name or Track name. It is unlike a traditional music suggestion engine that simply suggests a like-for-like music track: Pandora plays a full endless stream of music; one track leads into the next suggested track and so on.

Their recommendation system appears to analyse music for beats per minute (bpm), repeating melody, harmony, instrument type, vocals use, and other musical characteristics. I'll assume that music tracks (MP3, AU and other formats) can be analysed for content in such core manner computationally by a machine, although that seems quite remarkable. For example, analysing a JPEG for visual content would seem out of reach of today's technology. A few jobs on their site ask for musicians suggesting that humans categorize the tracks rather than machines. In fact, Pandora can outsource categorization to countries with cheaper but music-savvy labour. Nevertheless, their analytical method is currently a mystery to me.

Music tracks, books and other items are often categorized by large social groups; one track is suggested because another track is also enjoyed by the same group of individuals. Amazon's suggestion engine uses a derivation of this technique. Pandora's categorizing scheme appears to not require the social component for categorization, which requires 'seeding' or priming by people to be instantly quite accurate. Pandora does allow you to rate the track with a thumbs up or thumbs down, but it may only effect the content of your future radio stream rather than categorizing the track. Pandora is 'social' in other ways: one can share a custom radio stream with others.

Why is the CD a threatened medium. Pandora plays an endless stream of music that the listener will invariably love. I found it selected and played music I liked; I rarely gave a 'thumbs down' and skipped over even fewer. Quite frankly, I never need to purchase a CD again. In fact, a customized music streams offers a method of listening to music without any hard medium altogother, whether CD, DVD, miniDisc, and LP. Even the downloaded MP3 is unnecessary. Pandora is 'On Demand.'

The upcoming satellite based radio seems to be threatened too. Pandora does not require an expensive satellite infrastructre in order to deliver a fresh stream into my house. Pandora uses the Internet system that weaves across much of the developed world. Albeit, Sirus and XM Radio is making the greatest headway through the automobile industry where the Internet is currently void. (Hey, I am waiting for radio stations to broadcast TCP/IP and if you have a billion bucks Im sure it is possible)Moreover, Pandora is not paying Howard Stern $100 million a year for his expertise.

Of course, this phenomenon has a further consequence: the music-savvy DJ with his or her latest cool tracks is less necessary for his music expertise. A few can cash in their knowledge right now for the $15/hour job offered by Pandora.

A truly great irony is that Pandora currently raises money through advertising Amazon and ITunes links to CDs and MP3 files. There are fewer reasons for buying the track after Pandora. I just listened to a track and the next track is equally great.

The music business must realize that individuals are not necessarily interested in owning music but interesting in listening to music. It is a subtle difference: listening to music is the primary goal; owning music is not the primary goal. Owning has been the dominant way of achieving the goal of listening to music but this is clearly rapidly changing with technology. Hence, the music industry should be re-engineered around use rather than ownership. Those in the thick of the music industry must see the critical distinction. I find a similar mindset with the modern library: librarians are lovers of books; they fail to see that libraries are not for books but for people.

Check Pandora www.pandora.com asap, and tell me what you think about it. I love it.

Even Better is the IP based tuner from Slim Design. WICKED.