My son excitedly calling me to check out something on the computer is pretty much a daily, if not hourly, occurrence. He’s a teenager addicted to the wonders of the electronic world. We’re talking IGN podcasts, NPR streaming radio, animation programs, and music mixing capability as well as Charlie the Unicorn, Bill Cosby licks, and other popular YouTube videos.
Overall, he shows fairly impressive and disparate tastes for a fourteen year old. There are occasional transgressions into mindless garble that the adult or the female in me just can’t comprehend. But mostly, he’s got pretty interesting finds.
It’s just that with the internet, there’s a boundless supply of fodder. It never ends. His passion for it is limitless as well. So, when the “Mom! Mom!” bellowed out from upstairs last week, the bad parent in me has to admit, I really wasn’t that excited. But I sucked it up and tried to be an active, involved participant—and I’m really glad I did. What he discovered this time seems to be a smart, thoughtfully created tool that I’ve had a lot of fun with.
The site is Pandora.com. Their mission is to “play only music you’ll love.” You tell it what artists, or more precisely, what songs you enjoy, and it creates a personalized radio station. Better yet, you can have up to 100 radio stations customized around particular musical styles to suit your mood for certain days, times, or environments. It’s nice to be working at your computer, listening to songs you love, as well as being introduced to bands that become new favorites, without having to invest the time in being your own DJ.
Upon closer inspection, the science behind the tool captivates the marketer in me. Pandora actually sprang from a study called the Music Genome Project. A group of musicians and music lovers worked to define and capture the details that give each song “its magical sound—melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics”—close to 400 attributes. Armed with the classification criteria, Pandora’s analysts divide and conquer the music world, listening in person to songs from be-bop to Bach, garage band to jazz, pop to classic rock, spending 20-30 minutes per song to classify its sound. After that—voilà! The ability to suggest the music an individual might love based on her proven tastes.
All this for free? If you visit as a guest and not a paid subscriber, there are pop-ups. But they’re relatively unobtrusive, and I’m actually interested to track how on target the pop-up content is since it’s based on my tastes. Will my musical preferences translate to what fragrance I might wear or what trip I might take? I wonder how well they’ve targeted their audience?
“Mom, mom . . .” Uh oh. Now I’m supposed to check into something called imeem as well as play a round of Conduit. What’d I tell you? Boundless fodder.
–Karen Cramer
