Article published in October 2007 on the Novedge blog.
The idea behind Pandora is pretty simple: you start your own online radio station (a stream of songs) by selecting a single song or artist. Pandora Radio will start playing songs similar to your selection, and you can “approve” or “disapprove” each song. Over time, the played songs increasingly align with your taste and mood.
Franco Folini
Tim Westergren is the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Pandora. Pandora is a personalized online radio based on a sophisticated music classification system called the Music Genome Project. The idea is pretty simple from the user’s perspective: you start your own online radio station by selecting a song or an artist. Pandora Radio will start playing songs similar to your selection, and you can “approve” or “disapprove” each song. Over time, the proposed songs increasingly align with your taste and mood.
The Music Genome Project (MGP), at the core of Pandora, is the system that defines the similarity between songs. On the MGP, each song is classified and ranked by human musical experts using more than 100 parameters, or genes. The result is a continuous stream of music, from well-known pieces to entirely unknown songs, and therefore enjoyable. Be aware that Pandora can be addictive: after configuring a few Pandora radio stations, you will not be able to go back to your car radio. While driving to work in the mornings, I find myself looking for the “skip” or “more like this” buttons on my car stereo. Caveat: even the best car stereo doesn’t have the skip button.
I’m fascinated by Pandora not only for the pleasure of discovering new songs and artists, but also because I see a sophisticated and powerful technology made available (for free) in a simple, user-friendly yet effective way. I wish more high-tech companies would look at Pandora and be inspired. Tim (his Pandora profile) is the man behind Pandora, and I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing him in person.
The interview with Tim Westergren
Franco Folini: Hi, Tim! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and Pandora?
Tim Westergren: I’m a musician. Prior to founding this company, I played in rock bands, and I was also a composer for a while, so I wrote music for movies. I’ve lived in California for a long time, and I was living here in California in the late ’90s when the idea for the Music Genome Project came to me, largely arising out of my own musical experiences. What I really wanted to do was create a company that would help musicians more easily find their audiences by connecting things musicological. Pandora, or the Music Genome Project, which powers Pandora, was begun at the very end of 1999. We didn’t actually initially intend to launch this as a radio service — that came later –, but it has now become a sort of personalized radio service.
What I really wanted to do was create a company that would help musicians more easily find their audiences by connecting them with musicological resources.
Tim Westergren
Franco Folini: The codification of a musical piece within the “Music Genome Project” is mostly a human (expert) based activity and therefore expensive. According to Chris Anderson’s book, in order to be a profitable long tail business, unit cost (per product) should be close to zero. How do you manage these limitations?
Tim Westergren: In our world in web-casting, when it comes to performance fees and royalties, etc., we operate under some statutes, sort of a one-size-fits-all compulsory license, and so there’s actually no difference in cost for us for streaming an icon versus a lesser well-known artist. I think that in theory what Chris said is true, if we were actually getting direct licenses from artist we could probably command a lower license fee from somebody that was less well-known and needs the exposure more. But the reality for us is that the cost, both for analyzing a song — because it takes just as much time to analyze an individual track from any artist — as well as the cost of streaming, is the same, regardless of the popularity. So as for your question about how to overcome codification — our belief is that if you want good music, if you want to help people discover songs that they’ve never heard before and songs that nobody else has every gotten to know very well so there’s no kind of data around the music — the only way to do that is to understand the intrinsic qualities of that piece of music, and that’s what allows us to recommend music regardless of whether anybody knows it or not.
If you want good music, and help people discover songs that they’ve never heard before, songs that nobody else has ever gotten to know very well, the only way is to understand the intrinsic qualities of that piece of music, and that’s what allows us to recommend music regardless of whether anybody knows it or not.
Tim Westergren
Franco Folini: How would you compare the human-expert approach of Pandora with other selection and recommendation technologies, such as purely algorithmic or collaborative-social ones?
Tim Westergren: I think they’re just different. I don’t think you can say, scientifically, that one is necessarily better than the other. I think the only way to really determine that is based on how listeners respond. And I think different people like different things, so there are some people who much prefer to discover and explore music based on either well-known critics than sort of shape makers, or those who like to explore based on their peer group or other people that they consider themselves to be like are enjoying, and that’s a different approach. I think, though, that one thing that does stand out about what we do is our ability to really pluck out music that is really unknown and effectively promote it. I think that’s a distinct advantage of the Music Genome approach.
One thing that does stand out about what we do is our ability to really pluck out music that is really unknown and effectively promote it. I think that’s a distinct advantage of Pandora and the Music Genome approach.
Tim Westergren
Franco Folini: Do you think that the Pandora and the Music Genome Project experience could be successfully exported to some other field? Do you know anything about those companies?
Tim Westergren: I think there are already some companies working on the Wine Genome and the Art Genome Project. I’m afraid I don’t actually know anything about those companies; they’re kind of in stealth, actually. Nobody knows, I don’t know they exist, I don’t know anything about them, no.
Franco Folini: Personally, I perceive listening to Pandora radio as a “pleasant continuous musical stimulation” opposed to the “reassuring comfort zone” of the iPod. Do you think the two approaches are complementary or alternatives?
Tim Westergren: I think they’re complementary. I think that people want different things at different times. There are times when you really want to hear something specific, or when you want to hear a whole album, or you want to hear something that you know, or a playlist you’ve built. And that’s a particular frame of mind. But then there are times when I think that gets tiring. One phenomenon I think is common among many iPod owners is iPod fatigue, where they get tired of what they own and want more. I think discovery, serendipity, and a steady supply of new music are critical to a long-term love affair with music.
It is common among iPod owners to experience the iPod fatigue. Overtime they get tired of the music stored on their device and want more. Discovery, serendipity, and a steady supply of new music are critical to a long-term love affair with music.
Tim Westergren
Franco Folini: One of the most exciting aspects of Pandora is that it places an extremely sophisticated and powerful system under the end user’s full control through an amazingly simple interface. Does it frustrate you, in your daily life, having to interact with great technologies by means of poorly designed and unnecessarily complex interfaces?
Tim Westergren: I do think that one of the biggest problems with technology is how complex it is and how difficult things are to use. And I think that a lot of products that are made in technology are made by people for themselves. So you know, people who make music services or music playing devices often make them in a way that they, as a really sophisticated user of technology, or a sophisticated consumer of music, would like, and that is not what the larger audience is prepared for. And I think that one of the real advantages of Apple is that they’ve managed to really keep things simple and elegant. That runs throughout their products and is something that, interestingly, other companies have just not been able to replicate. Simplicity is one of the hardest things to accomplish. It seems easy when you do it right, but it’s very hard to get right.
Franco Folini: Can you tell us anything about Classical Music coming to Pandora Radio?
Tim Westergren: Absolutely, we’re coming up on that. We’ve been working on it for a couple of years now, and we’re going to launch it soon, so we’re very excited.
I would like to thank Tim Westergren for sharing his time to do this interview.
