Pandora

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Pandora is a music discovery service, only available in the US.

URL = http://www.pandora.com


Description

"Bit by bit, Pandora’s music analysts have built a massive archive of data, cataloging the minute characteristics of more than 500,000 songs, from alt-country to bossa nova to metal to gospel, for what is known as the Music Genome Project.

At pandora.com visitors are invited to enter the name of their favorite artist or song and to get in return a stream of music with similar “DNA," in effect a private Internet radio station microtailored to each user’s tastes." ([1])


Business Model

Pandora and Artist Payments

Have you heard of Donnie McClurkin, French Montana or Grupo Bryndis? If you haven't you're not alone. They are artists whose sales ranks on Amazon are 4,752, 17,000 and 183,187, respectively. These are all working artists who live well outside the mainstream - no steady rotation on broadcast radio, no high profile opening slots on major tours, no front page placement in online retail. What they also have in common is a steady income from Pandora. In the next twelve months Pandora is on track to pay performance fees of $100,228, $138,567 and $114,192, respectively, for the music we play to their large and fast-growing audiences on Pandora.


And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For over two thousand artists Pandora will pay over $10,000 dollars each over the next 12 months (including one of my favorites, the late jazz pianist Oscar Peterson), and for more than 800 we'll pay over $50,000, more than the income of the average American household. For top earners like Coldplay, Adele, Wiz Khalifa, Jason Aldean and others Pandora is already paying over $1 million each. Drake and Lil Wayne are fast approaching a $3 million annual rate each." (http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/archives/2012/10/pandora-and-art.html)


More Information

  1. See our entry on the Decentralization of Taste
  2. Review by Robin Good at create_custom_music_radio_station_Pandora_20050829.htm
  3. Pandora is mentioned in the article the New Tastemakers by the New York Times [2]
  4. Bio treatment of founder Tim Westergren, at http://thinnerism.cc/2007/10/28/music20-overview-–-part-4-tim-westergren-the-music-genome-project-and-pandora/