Comments on: The Beatles, Radiohead and Our Musical Tastes

By: Uncle Indie You Rock Radio

Uncle Indie You Rock Radio — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:22:42 +0000

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?

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:06:36 +0000

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.

By: Lucia @ Pandora

Lucia @ Pandora — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:53:08 +0000

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

By: omit

omit — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:23:06 +0000

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.”

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:13:06 +0000

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.

By: Michelle Greer

Michelle Greer — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:08:17 +0000

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 ;).