Pandora F2F

When I first used the music recommendation service Pandora in October of 2005, I was blown away by the quantum leap it made from other music sites, and how often it would surprise by playing a song I’d turn out to love by an artist I’d normally dismiss. I’ve used it on and off since then, mostly because I could never get it quite right enough to leave on like iTunes, but mostly because I’ve been in an IT position where I’ve had to police other people’s internet radio use, and didn’t want to be a hypocrite. But I’d stop by periodically and play with it, and stayed on their email list, where I got an invite to a user F2F with company co-founder Tim Westergren.

He was refreshingly blunt and plainspoken about the business and how they’re doing (in an off hand comment towards the end of the evening, he remarked that although they had 5 1/2 million listeners, they were still losing “gazillions of dollars.” ) He was also optimistic about the future, talking about a possible radio version of Pandora and of a new "random" mode, where it just started out playing music and adjusted itself based on your thumbs up or thumbs down.

The most stunning thing to me was that all of the music they play is analyzed personally, by their staff of "music experts." Darcy James Argue disputes their acumen for categorizing music here, and I can definitely attest to his concerns but the sheer scale of the project is what boggles my mind. Half a million songs categorized on 400 attributes seems like such a massive project that it's hard to see how it could scale it up. And they don't categorize the lyrics at all (according to Westergen, it's too hard to come to an objective agreement) or make any subjective decisions about the quality of what they play. Certain artists don't categorize well for recommendations- Westergen said that "Lou Reed is a pain in our ass," and they get constant complaints when someone tries to set up a station based on him.

More alarmingly, he mentioned that most the audience seemed to know but was news to me. Pandora operates under the DMCA, and cuts a large check to royalty companies every month for the small royalties it owes to every artist it plays. But half of the royalties owed to the artists never reach them at all.