I’ve recently become a big fan of Pandora, so I thought I’d share this little gem with you Dopers.
You enter a song or artist into Pandora’s web-client and it accesses the “Music Genome Database” and creates a mini “radio-station” based around how that artist or song sounds. The really neat thing is that Pandora intentionally ignores things like genre and popularity, opting to treat each song as a unique musical piece. The result is that you’ll often hear artists you’ve never heard of or you’d never expect to be associated with what you entered in which nonetheless share musical qualities with your station. It even tells you why it played a song or how their database classifies an artist (i.e. “…we’re playing this track because it features mellow rock instrumentation, folk influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, a vocal-centric aesthetic and major key tonality.”)
There are some drawbacks though: it sometimes won’t play the exact song or artist you request and you can’t rewind or skip back songs because of the licensing agreement they’ve got worked out. Occasionally, Pandora plays the same songs when I listen to the same station again, but you can always add artists to a station or make a new one to freshen things up a bit.
Basically, it’s a great way to find new artists you’ve never heard of before, and you can listen for 10 hours for free. Each song also has a link to buy the song from iTunes or Amazon. I opted to pay the $36 for a year’s worth of Pandora because I’m always in the computer lab and this is a great way to listen to music without bringing CDs or an iPod.
This is a very cool thing. I’ve had a chance to sit in on presentations of the fundamental technology behind this (the Music Genome Project) and it’s fascinating.
They’re doing a fairly deep analysis of each individual track, and summing up the results by album and artist. The result is a database that says Elton John and Billy Joel are similar, not because anyone said they are, but because their bodies of work sum up to be similar. Neat stuff.
Thanks for linking up Pandora – I hadn’t realized they had put an “Internet radio” front on it.
Goes off to build himself an all-80s New Wave station…
Tried it. It said if I liked Kate Bush then I’d like “If I Could Turn Back Time” by Cher. That’s just retarded. (Kate Bush music has a gay gene?) Apparently it only considers external musical cues, and makes no attempt to acknowledge lyrical context or anything like that. And even so, Kate Bush = Cher? Even musically?
I suspect it will work best for people with and uncomplicated relationship with music.
In other words, it seems to take the feedback only as a way to LIMIT the choices, not to expand them.
It would work better if it worked a bit more like NATURAL natural selection: instead of merely elminating the traits deemed not fit enough to survive, it should throw in a mutation every once in a while, to keep the genetic material fresh.
It should throw in a Ramones song or something out of left field, for a greater triangulation of an individual’s taste. Just because I like Kate Bush doesn’t mean I only listen to melodramatic chick music. Kate is that, but she’s also a great deal more, that Pandora doesn’t account for.
Here 's my thread on Pandora just two weeks ago. Notice no replies.
Figure it would take a smelly hippie to have “street cred” when it comes to music.
Just kidding - I’m a big fan as well, Corporate Hippie. I’ve found some great new bands. Although I will note that sometimes, Pandora will take me places that I never wanted to go. I mean Backstreet Boy, NSYNC, 98 degree territory. How do I get to 98 degrees from Willie Nelson? Riddle me that…
Anyways, good times…
And on preview - lissener have you tried doing a station with multiple songs? That’s where I’ve found the most enjoyable listens (rather than just sticking with an artist). After you’ve started a station, you Right Click on it and you can add another song / mix it up a bit. See if that makes it less lame.
Sorry PeterWiggen! I did do a search before I posted but I only gave the results a cursory glance.
lissener, I’d say that it takes a little fine tuning to get a radio station playing the kind of stuff you’d like or expect. As PeterWiggen suggested, adding additional artists to a radio station helps expand its scope, and if you give a song the thumbs up or thumbs down you can steer a station towards or away from different sounds.
It is true that Pandora doesn’t take things like lyrical content into account, but honestly I think it’s pretty decent for an automated system. I’m a music lover, but Pandora doesn’t bother me when a wayward song pops up because I can just give it the thumbs down, skip it, or change stations. Actually, most of the time I’ll just laugh at the idea of so-and-so artist coming up in a certain station and just listen to it anyway.
I started with Neko Case and the next song was by the Old '97s. So that’s not the case.
It’s interesting so far – that is, 6 songs in – and I assume it gets better the more feedback you give it. Have you tried adding a male artist you like to the same station? You’ve got the option with the “more kinds of music” button.
What would be really interesting is if you had a “mate these two artists” feature that would bring up songs with features like both parents. As is, if you start up a station with two wildly disparate artists, you end up with a station that plays two wildly disparate styles of music.
Strange, it recognized Pentangle but not Steeleye Span – go figure. Adding Sting produced songs by Sting/Police and Chris De Burgh. So, to recap I entered Pentangle, Sting, Jethro Tull and so far I’ve gotten (Not in Order):
Pentangle:2
Sting:2
Police:1
The Incredible String Band:1
Bert Jansch:1
Dave Van Ronk:1
Chris De Burgh:2
Squeeze:1
Sondra Lerche:1
Sky:1
Nick Drake:1
On the whole an interesting if slightly off-kilter experience. I think I did better than most. I’d do it again, don’t know if I’d pay for it.
Today I came across an e-mail address on the Pandora site where you can suggest artists or songs to be added. I asked them to add the artist Giant Robot and got an e-mail back saying they’d pass it on to the music genome team and asking if there were any particular albums or songs I like. I can’t wait to see if they add it and, if so, how soon.
Indy’s been doing this for several months. It’s a bit more interactive though, since you rate songs by stars, or press “Next” if you don’t like something. At first you might hear all kinds of shit, but after a while the quality does get better. Seems to anyway.
Pandora hadn’t heard of Happy Rhodes. How the fuck can someone so brilliant still be so obscure to music lovers? The general public, yeah, I can see that. The industry and hard-core music aficionados? They should know who she is. It baffles me. It’s not right, I tell ya, it’s just not right.
Don’t tell me I actually meant Happy Mondays! I’ll slap you upside the head you damned stupid program.
I like it. I’ve been listening for about an hour and it hasn’t hit anything I want to turn off yet. I created stations for Peter Gabriel, Rickie Lee Jones and David Bowie, and I like the stuff they’re picking.
Launch cast uses (IIRC, I talked to the engineers about it but they were a little mysterious and didn’t really believe client-guy wanted to talk about the algorithm with them) a mix of collaborative filtering and editorial matching. That means they’re starting with a list that says “Artist A has similar artists B, C and D” and then learning from the behavior of thier audience – if I know you like A, and you consistently listen to songs from B that I play for you, but flag “never play again” anything from C or D, that tells me something. If a lot of people do it, then B is clearly more similar to A.
Pandora on the other hand, is working from the standpoint of “this song has these characteristics”. Any given song (or for artist, set of songs) thus has a set of characteristics, and two songs are similar if their data pattern matches, not if someone said so.
For example, I gave it “Fashion” by David Bowie and got back “Jacob’s Ladder” by Bruce Hornsby and the Range, because it had:
electric rock instrumentation
mild rhythmic syncopation
subtle use of vocal harmony
extensive vamping
an electric guitar solo
Those are the characteristics it’s using to calculate similarity, at least a few of them.
It does vary off the pattern to see what you like, and I suspect it’s learning from what you like, to determine how to weight its similarity choices.
I think they have a LOT of holes. Their site claims 300,000 tracks in the library, which is not much. There are something like 200,000 non-classical music CDs more or less in print in the US. At an average of 8 tracks per, that’s 1.6 million tracks. That’s a hell of a lot of work to analyze. There may be problems with licensing as well.
I’m liking it thus far – it’s similar to my experience with Launchcast, but I am enjoying the selections somewhat better. Time will tell if the UI stands up to usage on my system. In this AM’s usage at work, I kept accidentally sending links into the player window, causing it to lose my session with a given track. I recall similar challenges with Launchcast.
Interesting. From what I’ve noted, Launch Cast has done a better job of matching music to my tastes because it seems easier, in its algorithm, to pick a song outside my genre. I mean, it seems to be based on the music other people like rather than matching to the qualities of the music you like. There seems to be a more human input to it. If I like the Pixies, Launch Cast might give me, I dunno, Stereolab or Blur or something, even though musically these artists may be dissimilar (at least by Pandora’s algorithm.)
I just find I get more variety from minimal input and better matches through Launch Cast than Pandora.
After entering two bands, it recommended one of my favorite songs, from a third.
So far it seems like a promising and interesting service.
Question, though: How the hell do I take music off my station? I gave it the name of a song… and it apparently only had that name in its database once, so it automatically chose that song for me… however, it was from a different band than the one I was looking for… how do I go about telling it not to add it, or remove it from the station?
