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Pandora

www.pandora.com

Methodology

Pandora is a personalized music recommendation service that generates a personalized streaming internet radio station, which recommend new tracks to the listener based on tracks or artists the user likes. Pandora relies on humanized audio analysis in the form of the Music Genome Project, a database of "genetic" information about the qualities of songs. These types of qualities include genre influences, harmonic patterns, time signatures, instrumentation, tonalities, feelings, and many more. Pandora's recommendations are based on individual tracks (or on the overall tendency of an artist's tracks) and the service plays similar tracks that contain many of the same genetic elements as the tracks or artists the user enjoys.

Pros and Cons

Pandora uses an intricate human audio analysis system to generate its recommendations, which tend to be fairly similar to the track around which they center, but also tend to be unusual and perplexing. This is because Pandora does not take into account the social context of the music it recommends, and instead relies solely on technical analysis. This one-sided and superficial analysis leads to many recommendations that are similar "genetically," but sound and feel very different to the listener. Furthermore, Pandora recommends music that is similar in all or most elements to the starting track, and therefore is less valuable for expanding music understanding as for reenforcing it. All in all, the concept behind Pandora is interesting and the service delivers similar tracks to the listener, but ultimately the service leaves much to be desired when trying to discover new music.