Seeing inside Pandora's box...

As you already know, I'm a huge Pandora fan. I love what they're doing, and I think the Music Genome Project is super interesting. My fandom recently got me an invite from Tom Conrad to visit Pandora's offices, and check out the behind the scenes world at Pandora. I took advantage of this yesterday. It was cool. (And Tom is the CTO, and is super cool too!)

Before I talk about what I learned yesterday, I have to tell you two pieces of scoop I got. First, Pandora just closed a deal with MSN Radio, which starting today is run through Pandora. Check it out here. Second, Pandora launched its first Pandora Podcast! Here's the description of the first episode:

In the first installment of our podcast, Pandora music analyst Kevin Seal (of Griddle) works with Greg and Kelly from the San Francisco band 20 Minute Loop to lead you through the basics of vocal harmony: tutti harmony, unison singing, parallel and contrary motion, call and response and more. Take a peek under the hood with us and listen to The Basics of Vocal Harmony (9 mins.)

Once you've listened to the podcast, you might want to check out the vocal harmony examples on the next page to further hone your expertise.

So, now on with the tour: Tom showed me around their office in Oakland, and where all the musicians sit who are diligently listening to thousands of songs and cataloging the 400+ musical attributes of each song into the genome. Picture an open space with windows, and a bunch of computer stations. Each station with a set of headphones, and a person listening and entering attributes into a database (the Savage Beast system). Each of the music coders (I don't know what their title is!) has a background in music (usually a 4-year degree in it) and undergoes about 40-50 hours training at Pandora for each genre of music before starting to catalog songs on their own. The goal is that no matter which musician is doing the cataloging, the songs are cataloged exactly the same.

I also found it interesting that Pandora buys and rips all their own CDs. They don't download anything. I guess that makes sense because the sound quality of a download (mp3) file is not at all as good as CD quality. So for every song in their 400,000+ song collection they have a CD and a case that matches it.

Tom and I discussed some of the practical difficulties in their system, esp. when the same "song" appears as different "tracks" on a number of albums (e.g., the original album, the 'best of' album, a soundtrack, etc.). So when a user calls up a particular song, the question of which album art to post becomes relevant. And, as much as possible, it makes sense that the album art should be the original album, rather than a say "Best hits of the 70s" CD that came out later. This might sound simple, but it's a rather difficult task to accomplish technically.

On the legal side, I think it's fascinating that the only way Pandora can exist is because of the change in the US Copyright Act back in 1998, which created SoundExchange and the compulsory licensing scheme. In other countries, Pandora has to clear rights one record company/artist at a time, and that process is clearly a massive undertaking.

I owe a HUGE thank you to Tom for the invitation, and it was also great to meet Michele, the Communications direcor, and Jessica Stone, the VP of Business Develoment. Thanks for a fun afternoon!