Pandora and the music genome project

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John
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Pandora and the music genome project

Post by John »

With the upcoming iradio from Apple I'm kind of afraid we're going to lose something very special in the world of music...Pandora and more importantly the Music Genome Project. It's an amazing thing that has been copied but never replicated. Every other Internet radio service that I've used that claims to find songs that match the root song just doesn't do the job like Pandora does. For example, I can give Spotify radio the song Erotica by Madonna and it will give me artists similar to Madonna and will try to keep them with the same style as that particular song. It's driven by Echo Nest which does all the analysis automatically with computer driven data. That's where it fails I think. Pandora isn't perfect, but they actually hire people who listen to every song that has ever entered the Pandora database and break down the tonality and other aspects of the song. I just don't think a computer can do what a human can. I have yet to see a program that accurately can identify the chords of songs- how can we expect for computers to identify the mood of a song? When I plug Madonna's Erotica (I am using this because it has a very distinct mood) into Pandora, a station came back with songs that matched it's mood, not just the artist or the genre. It wasn't perfect, but with a few thumbs ups and downs it got pretty close to perfect. But, Pandora has faced struggles over the years and iradio is probably going to be the end of them. Even if iradio uses whatever imperfect algorithm Genius uses, it's still going to draw people in Apple's ecosystem in, leaving Pandora in the dust. Pandora has some cons, the inability to pay to get rid of skip limits is a huge drawback. But, the Music Genome Project has to live on, because it really is quite amazing what they've been able to accomplish with it.
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Blanco
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Re: Pandora and the music genome project

Post by Blanco »

I understand your point of view. For me anyway I can not access Pandora. It's only for listeners who are not outside the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. Forced to restrict access to its service to other countries helps them lose popularity and moral and financial support, I guess. Anyway, maybe I can not listen to Pandora, but if it is true what you say and it is important to keep it as before, and contributes positively to music in general, I support you.
Last edited by Blanco on Mon Jun 24, 2013 6:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
John
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Re: Pandora and the music genome project

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I didn't realize that Pandora wasn't global. That's too bad. It's not hugely popular in the US either, at least not on the level that Spotify's at. Which is understandable since it's not on demand music. But, what will be sad is when Apple rolls out iRadio and that becomes popular for doing the same thing that Pandora does but not as well. Who knows, maybe it will be a good service. I like Apple products, I use an iPhone and iPad, but I've always felt that their software is always behind the times. I know what Genius is like, and it's not that great. It's basically on the same level as Spotify radio or Slacker radio. I'd be pleasantly surprised if they retooled the algorithim for iRadio, but even if they did, it would still be driven by computer data and it's easy to see how that doesn't work as well as Pandora's human driven Music Genome Project.
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Re: Pandora and the music genome project

Post by jimmyj »

John wrote:I didn't realize that Pandora wasn't global. That's too bad. It's not hugely popular in the US either, at least not on the level that Spotify's at. Which is understandable since it's not on demand music. But, what will be sad is when Apple rolls out iRadio and that becomes popular for doing the same thing that Pandora does but not as well. Who knows, maybe it will be a good service. I like Apple products, I use an iPhone and iPad, but I've always felt that their software is always behind the times. I know what Genius is like, and it's not that great. It's basically on the same level as Spotify radio or Slacker radio. I'd be pleasantly surprised if they retooled the algorithim for iRadio, but even if they did, it would still be driven by computer data and it's easy to see how that doesn't work as well as Pandora's human driven Music Genome Project.

I love Pandora and I fully support their service. I beg to differ about Pandora not being too popular in the US, I have found thru the years that Pandora has gained a following here. I think you are spot on about the differences between the two services and that Pandora actually gets it pretty right 90% of the time. But that is just the thing, if Pandora keeps doing what it does well then it shouldnt have to worry about the competition. The market will decide which will be successful, know what I mean?
John
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Re: Pandora and the music genome project

Post by John »

It's different when Apple gets involved though. People are tied into that ecosystem and will drop Pandora to have iRadio tied into all the other Apple products they use. I get it, I'm a big fan of the Apple ecosystem, how everything works together. I really wish that Apple was going with an on demand service rather than a radio service because that is something that Apple could kill the competition in because of their huge library. But with radio and discovery, I would rather take Pandora's library of 900K songs that gets recommendations right than Apple's huge library that probably isn't going to be able to discover songs nearly as well as Pandora. If Apple went on demand, that would be a game changer for subscription music. iRadio is going to be a game changer too, where people are going to discover streaming music for the first time. They aren't going to be the best at what they do, but it's no doubt they'll have the largest audience if history proves right about Apple users. People stay within the Apple ecosystem because it's easy to use, and works so well. The only thing that they've really failed at is the social networking aspect of music, but that's just because it doesn't matter that much. iRadio is going to be another success story for Apple, I just hope it's not the opposite for Pandora.
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Listyguy
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Re: Pandora and the music genome project

Post by Listyguy »

Yeah for some reason Apple people think that everything Apple does will be the greatest thing ever.
John
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Re: Pandora and the music genome project

Post by John »

They do have a history of innovation or at the very least perfecting something that already exists. Apple doesn't let people down all that often so they've gained a loyalty that not many other companies can rival. I'm not against Apple at all, companies like that should be applauded. I don't even have a problem with them launching iRadio, I just wish that it wasn't going to kill Pandora. Maybe it won't, but Pandora's already struggling...
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Re: Pandora and the music genome project

Post by dr_Robert »

I hope that Pandora survives, but I fear that you are right. In a sense I think Pandora lost the game when it, because of some court ruling, had to cut off the services to large parts of the world about five years ago. Yes, Pandora used to be accessible in Sweden and I know that a lot of people used it. It was perfect in the work place for example, because many of us want a particular "mood" in the music we listen to when we work. In my workplace, all the PhD-students and post-docs were listening to Pandora all the time at that point.

When we lost Pandora, Spotify was obviously the next thing since it's after all is a Swedish product. But Pandora used to be much bigger than Spotify here. Anyways, something not all bad came out of the court ruling. For all Spotify's glory, I however still miss the music genome project .
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Re: Pandora and the music genome project

Post by Jirin »

I think it's possible for a computer to be able to identify the mood of the song.

But they sure can't do it yet. You know what? Challenge accepted.
John
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Re: Pandora and the music genome project

Post by John »

Jirin wrote:I think it's possible for a computer to be able to identify the mood of the song.

But they sure can't do it yet. You know what? Challenge accepted.
:D

I hope so, because there's no way that a company is going to tackle mood quite the way that Pandora has. It's so cool when I can play a station and hear even similar riffs in back to back songs. That has to be somewhat of a coincidence, but it's happened more than once...

There is one other program I've found that does a better job than most called Moodagent, which is actually available as an add-on in the Spotify desktop app. It's not nearly as good as Pandora, but it does a decent job of getting tempo right. Not so much mood as it's name suggests though.
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