Anthony Bernatas, Rocio Funez,Michelle Grover, Andrey Tsatsulin

Pandora is created by The Music Genome Project, which got its start on January 6, 2000.

It was created by Tim Westergren, a graduate from Stanford University, as well as by Jon Kraft and Will Glaser.

Tim Westergrenhttp://emusician.com/tutorials/712mbi_fig1.jpg

Once you are registered to Pandora.com, choose an artist or song you like.

The site will then create a playlist of songs similar to the artist type or song you chose.

When it plays a song, it tells you the artist, song, and album, and it also shows the album cover.

It gives you the option to give the song a rating of a “thumbs down” or “thumbs up”

Thumbs down will make the playlist skip to the next song. It will also never play that song again and eliminate the remaining songs similar to it.

Thumbs up lets Pandora know that you like this song and want them to play more songs like it.

Pandora knows people like multiple kinds of music, so you can chose additional stations to create.

Once you’ve created various stations, you can select “QuickMix.” In this, you select the playlists you want to combine and shuffle. This way you can listen to all the music you want together.

The many employees of Pandora spend half and hour analyzing each song before it goes onto the site.

Each song is “represented by a vector.” These contain genes that classify each of the songs. Depending on the genre of music, it can have a range of 150-500 genes. The genes reflect characteristics of that song.“…everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.” (Tim Westergren, pandora.com)

Pandora is a free service to use. They make their money through advertisements, mostly for cell phones and fast food restaurants.

(All photos from pandora.com)

However, you do have the option of paying a $36 annual fee. This gives you the opportunity to use the application on your Sprint phones, and you can get a player from Sonos or Logitech that you can use in your home away from your computer. It will also play the music without any ads included.

Drawbacks? On a radio station, you are limited to only skipping 5 songs an hour. This includes giving a song a “thumbs down” rating and having it be skipped. You can still give songs a “thumbs down” rating after the 5 skips, but it continues playing that song anyway. Once you’ve reached the 5 skips though, it recommends that you try another station. It continues learning what you like and don’t like.

Users contribute to Pandora by creating hacks to allow users to select whatever song they want to listen to.

Using Pandora Pandora is very simple to start

using thanks to a neat, efficient appearance. The registration process doesn’t ask for a lot of information about you and there’s no email confirmation (which for some is a big plus since it saves time).

Once you are registered you’re taken immediately to a page where you can select the artist, song, or composer that will generate the rest of the playlist

for you.

User positioning

Data driven

Cost-effective scalability

Contains podcasts

Extends out to Facebook

Broadens past your PC

Can be used without a web browser

The user can control the music they listen to whether they register or not.

It allows the user to choose songs, artists, or radio stations they would enjoy listening to and saves (bookmarks) their favorite artists, songs, or radio stations.

Just as well, users can share their profile with other users and invite others to use Pandora .

Pandora runs on a database filled with different musical artists, songs, and radio stations.

Simple steps

let users put

Pandora onto

their Facebook

Pandora is not only an internet radio, but it also has podcasts. Pandora Podcast is a musicology show that is hosted by Kevin Seal of the

band Griddle. The podcast goes into describing the detail and amount of work that goes

into making music. It is updated weekly, and each show focuses on different musical topics and

also include special guests.

VideoPictures from ilike.com, last.fm, ruckus.com, live365.com, napster.com, and

http://blogs.sun.com/plamere/entry/what_is_the_itunes_genius

Bibliography

Kayne, R. "What is the Music Genome Project?" WiseGEEK. <http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-music-genome-project.htm>.

"Music Genome Project." Wikipedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/music_genome_project>.

"Pandora (music service)." Wikipedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pandora_(music_service)>.

Pandora Radio. <http://www.pandora.com/>

Westergren, Tim. "The Music Genome Project." Pandora Radio. <http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml>.