Pandora is a free Online music service…and it’s betting you won’t find another music site on the Web that knows what you’ll love better than they do.
The New York Times published an article called The Song Decoders that describes the mathematical process Pandora uses to predict your musical preferences.
Pandora uses a wide range of metrics from melody to motion in determining what type of new music you will enjoy listening to.
In other words, they are refining the music they serve to discriminating eardrums — so you won’t leave the site.
However things play out for Pandora as a business, its approach is worth understanding if you’re interested in the future of listening. It’s the “social” theories of music-liking that get most of the attention these days: systems that connect you with friends with similar tastes, or that rely on “collaborative filtering” strategies that cross-match your music-consumption habits with those of like-minded strangers. These popular approaches marginalize traditional gatekeepers; instead of trusting the talent scout, the radio programmer or the music critic, you trust your friends (actual or virtual), or maybe just “the crowd.”
Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.
Now to how this strategy applies to you, an aspiring social media influencer. The bottom line is we all need to focus a bit more on the data that reveal insights into user decisions. By getting to know our audience better than anyone else we can keep them on our Online properties longer — and that’s the first step in driving people to perform a profitable action.
The competition is just a click away…what are you doing to create a powerfully unique experience?
