Michelle has posted a great wrap up of Tim Westergren’s speech at Pandora’s Get Together here in Austin. Pandora sent me a number of reminders about the event, but I chose not to go, which is a shame because it sounds like it was fun.
Michelle’s post reminds me of the Ultimate Music Recommendation Smackdown panel I attended the last day of SXSWi ‘07, which added a lot of interesting pieces to my understanding of music consumption on the Net as well as how the comparisons and matches are made. The most interesting takeaway from that panel was the fact that four of the five services (Pandora, Last.Fm, iLike and I believe Bryght (site may be down)) had to add filters to their systems after discovering that their services were recommending The Beatles and Radiohead for almost every other song or artist. “We see you like Hank Williams, we think you would like Creep from Radiohead”.
That’s pretty damn interesting if you think about it. People are naturally ranking Radiohead at a level of interest as high, or higher as The Beatles by their natural listening habits. Some of this should be attributed to the average age of people using their services, which I assume skews to the younger side, but that’s still a major point when you think about the popularity of the two bands, and the legacy of Radiohead.
The other interesting point I took away from that point of the conversation is the fact that in order for those two connections to be made listeners included the two artists amongst a wide variety of bands and genres. A quick view of my own listening habits and those of many of my friends provides some reinforcement, but I can’t wait to see the types of connections being formed world-wide. It would be amazing to have a “map” or some other form of visual analytics of these musical connections.
Thanks for sharing the experience Michelle!
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6 comments so far… Jump into the discussion and tell us what you think.
Was the one out of five that didn’t recommend Radiohead for everyone actually Pandora? Because Pandora uses musicians to filter recommendations, not users. They found that the data was too hodgepodge if they composed the Music Genome from user recommendations.
That would be pretty sad if their musicians compared Hank Williams with Radiohead. My knowledge of Hank is pretty limited, but I don’t remember any of his music fitting the electronica bill.
Very nice post ;).
I think one of the reasons that Pandora found the recommendations less than satisfactory was due to connections like Radiohead, but it’s been a year, so my memory is fuzzy as to who chimed in on that point.
I went to the panel, too. I think Pandora distinguishes itself from some other services because 1) it takes an editorial approach as opposed to using collaborative filtering, 2) it doesn’t skew to major label artists — all artists accepted have an equal shot at getting heard, and 3) it uses musicians instead of community voice to classify the music included on it. Westergren said that they had tried opening Pandora up to the masses for rating music, but found that they ended up with “mush”, which may be something like you’re describing.
He also had a funny anecdote about somebody who had set up a Sarah McLachlan station and had Celine Dion come up. The listener argued that there was no way he liked Celine Dion. Westergren replied that according to their algorithms, Celine Dion fit in with that style of music. Some time later, the guy emailed back and said, “I can’t believe it, I f–king like Celine Dion.”
Nice post, Alex! You make some astute observations, for sure. Thanks for sharing.
Michelle and Omit are right, Pandora uses musicological traits coded by humans to match up songs, so it would be pretty hard to get “Creep” to show up on a Hank Williams station, happily.
That does not mean we’re immune from serving up some strange matches, of course. ;) That comes with the territory.
Email me any time, if you have any questions or comments! (that goes for Michelle and Omit too.)
- Lucia, from Pandora
lucia at pandora dot com
Thanks Lucia. I love Pandora, and it’s great to see y’all talking with the community. The way that Pandora categorizes, using humans is one of the key reasons I set up and tune in to custom channels on Pandora, something I don’t do with the other services. I use iLike and Last.FM for tracking what I listen to, not for the recommendations they provide.
Music “consumption”? You mean Music Freeloading! Selling music on the Net is like trying to sell icecubes to Eskimo’s. Why pay when there is sense of entitlement, you know?