[FA Worldmusic] Pandora

[Dmitri Vietze]

I am glad you contacted them, Mark. Last time I did about a year ago, they
said it was gonna be a long while before they get caught up enough to
introduce world music. They said something about starting with Brazilian
music at the time. 

When I met the fellow (Francois?) from Sony Labs France at Porto Musical in
Brazil, he was introducing software that could do what Pandora does
manually, coding music according to categories. The difference between
Pandora's music-genome driven model, and Sony's (which is still being
developed) is that Pandora's takes 20-30 minutes per song by a human marking
which of the 400 musical traits the song matches. Sony's thing can relate
songs without even naming the traits, and it is much quicker. So certain
songs that you like may match other songs because of sonic-physical
similarities that a human ear may or may not identify. Pandora's founder was
quotred online:

"World music for example, requires a much broader palette of different
instruments than are used in pop music. It doesn't make sense to do all that
work in pop music when it's redundant 99% of the time so we adapt the
template to closer match what the demands really are for that genre of
music."

Makes me think it is still going to be a while before they really integrate
world. And the Sony guy said it will be passi before they are "done." Who
knows. 

But it's still very cool and fun to play with. 

Much respect,

Dmitri
TEL +1-812-339-1195
music at rockpaperscissors.biz
www.rockpaperscissors.biz


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Gorney [mailto:mark at worldisc.net] 
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 2:37 PM
To: fa-worldmusic at folk.org
Subject: [FA Worldmusic] Pandora

Hi Everyone,

 

I'm sure that by now a lot of you are aware of Pandora www.pandora.com
<http://www.pandora.com/> , the streaming audio and 'music discovery
service' powered by the Music Genome Project. 

 

It's very cool, has an interesting operating model and is growing but is
weak on the world/global side of things. I contacted them about this and
they replied that they are "rather US-centric right now" but are working
hard to build up their international music collection and that their
'US-centricity' is going to start changing as they introduce music from
around the world. Incidentally, if you look at their genre category list,
you'll see a space at the end where (an admittedly very broad) "World" could
go.

 

The point of all this is (with their blessing): Send your releases!
http://blog.pandora.com/faq/#31. 

 

Please note that I am not involved with them in any way. Just trying to help
further The Cause.

 

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

Mark Gorney

Worldisc

415.826.2638

mark at worldisc.net