Music Genome Project
=Social Music recommendation service used by Pandora
Description
"The Music Genome Project breaks music into four "genomes," or genres to us laymen: rock/pop/country, jazz, hip-hop/electronic, and world. Within each genome, the team rates a song against 200-400 separate sliding scales, or "genes"-- so, for example, a song could be broken down by its time signature, instrumentation, lyrical content, and production style. Pandora can tell you that Spoon's "My Mathematical Mind" features "acoustic rhythm piano, a 12/8 time signature, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, a vocal-centric aesthetic, and triple note feel"-- and that's why it came up on a post-rock station, instead of the indie rock channel where it "belongs."
gatekeeper for Pandora's catalog is buyer (and indie pop musician) Michael Zapruder, who buys the CDs as well as wades through the stacks of albums they're getting from labels. If he feels a disc is good enough, he passes it on to the analysts, who pick the few songs they think are worth including. (Pandora rarely takes every single track from an album.)
Pandora has a comparatively small pool of music-- 400,000 tracks, compared to around 2 million at Napster or iTunes-- and it only grows by roughly 8,000 songs a month. The team doesn't want to move any faster. At heart, Pandora is an internet radio station; you may spend hours tweaking and probing it, but at the end of the day, you're supposed to sit back and enjoy it. "Our plan is definitely to be selective," explains Zapruder. "Bigger isn't necessarily better. Better is better."" (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/36524-better-than-we-know-ourselves)
More Information
History and status of Music Recommendation, at http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/36524-better-than-we-know-ourselves