Description: In the article which centers on pandora login, the author talks about how the streaming service finds music for you based on your suggestion of an artist. Great music discovery is effortless and free. It’s easy to create personalized stations that play only music you’ll love.
I’m Sammy, welcome to the rocket out blog coming to you from sunny, warm, wonderful, brilliant Austin Texas, I’m from Chicago, I can’t deal with that weather anymore, it’s been winter for nine years there, I can’t deal with that anymore, so I’m so happy to be here.
We’re hanging out at the Pandora house, we are hanging out with the man that is the reason why Pandora exists, when you type in a name, all the other corresponding names come up with it, you can listen to all your favorite tunes, all your favorite music.
Can you introduce yourself and let the people know what exactly you do at Pandora? I’m Eric Bieschke, I am Pandora’s chief scientist and vice president of playlist, Pandora is something that’s always been a mystery to me even though it shouldn’t be.
The way Pandora works for those of you that don’t know is that you go to Pandora, you type in your favorite artist, it’ll say great, here’s this artist, we’re going to give you a playlist of other artists that we think you’ll also enjoy, the thing is while it technically makes sense, I like Radiohead, so I’m going to get bands hopefully that are a lot aligned with that taste.
But the one thing that’s always plagued me is the algorithm behind it, if you type in a band name, how are you supposed to know exactly what other bands you think I’m going to enjoy or I should enjoy? How exactly does that process work?
We did the fundamental thing at Pandora, 14 years ago, we created this thing called the Music Genome Project which is a project where we’ve employed musicians and musicologists to listen to tracks one at a time, articulate to a computer the essence of every track, every song.
They put on headphones, they’ll keep listening to a track over and over again, they’ll pull out all of the essential elements that define that track, it is an electric guitar solo, it lit the guitar on fire, it’s danceable, they capture the essence of every song one at a time.
We’ve been doing this for the last 14 years, we’ve done this to more than a million tracks so far, at this point we’ve got the world’s most comprehensive track-by-track understanding of music, what’s interesting to me too is that there are certain bands you could pick up, other genres may pop into that playlist that may have nothing to do with it.
For example somebody picks Slayer, I don’t know why Vivaldi shows up, Tom Araya is the 17th century composer, how does that work? What is the common thread? I’m sure that you have examples of this as well, what exactly would be that underlying thread to be able to connect artists that on the surface level may seem as if they have no connection at all?
We build on this premise of the Music Genome Project, people like music that sounds like the music they already know they like, that’s a good starting point, that’s how we figure out what music to try for people, if you tell us you like Radiohead, we’ll play other bands that the Music Genome Project says sound like Radiohead.
Over time we’ll keep doing this to you and trying different things on you, as you tell us you what you like and what your preferences are, we will personalize your experience to steer it in the direction you like, you could go from Slayer to Vivaldi, that would be tricky, but I would tell you a lot about you more than what the Music Genome Project says about Slayer.
That’s our network, we try things when the Music Genome Project says that this is a new band and we want to try it out on the Radiohead station, as we get feedback from you, we will guide your experience into whatever specific thing you want to hear.
How much music do you have cataloged in that library? How big is Pandora’s library now? Today we listen to more than a million tracks which is enough to keep everyone on the planet busy and never hear a repeat track for their entire lives.
It’s a monumental undertaking, we’ve got 25 musicians on staff who’ve been doing this for more than a decade, it’s a cool project, how often are you updating? There are new artists popping up all the time. We have a curation team at Pandora.
This is another dozen people whose full-time job is to find bands and get them on Pandora, we literally went and looked at the setlist for every single band here, we try to get close to all of them, I’m not sure if you have every single band here, a few of them have released music not on albums that we can purchase, but we’ve got comprehensive coverage at least.
You were telling me that a couple of months ago, you found a band, you discovered a band called a magic man, when you first heard them, did you think that you needed to get a check to see if it’s on Pandora?
I was out, I’m mostly listening to live music rather than Pandora while I’m here, but magic man was a total sleeper hit for me, I went to see a Tokyo Police Club, Magic Man was on before it.
When things happen in Pandora, when things shut down, I don’t know if you saw the Saturday Night Live sketch with Bruno Mars, is that how they fix it? You find one person that can sing well and he sings into the computer until everything’s back up to speed.
That’s how it goes, lots of Halloween costumes around the office dressed as Bruno Mars, it was good, if you get a glitch in the system, everything shuts down, how long does it take to reboot Pandora? If somebody’s listening, all of a sudden it stops working, because nowadays with technology people freak out if one small thing goes wrong, how quickly do you manage to reboot your system and get things going again?
We have almost no downtime, knock on wood, on the technical side we have teams of people who are devoted to scaling our infrastructure making it very redundant and making sure that Pandora doesn’t go down, but we’ve got people on call non-stop to bring up Pandora if it’s got a hitch.
We also buffer songs, as you’re listening, Pandora can have a hiccup you’ll never know because the music keeps going.
Did you feature any specific artists? Because you had your showcase for Pandora recently. We’ve got four days here at the discovery den, we start at 2 in the afternoon, we finish two at night, you got more than 35 bands yesterday.
I’m a big electronic fan, yesterday was electronic, today’s hip-hop, R&B; tomorrow’s American folk, Saturday is indie, so we’re hitting the whole spectrum, we got three Grammy winners, one Rock Hall of Famer Wanda Jackson, it should be a sweet lineup.
I know this may seem to be a question concerning the website is updating itself constantly, but what are the next big milestones at Pandora hopes to achieve? I think a big one for us is that we want to start pushing more data to artists.
Pandora has been sitting on a wealth of information about who their audiences are, who should open for you, who should you should open for, we’re sitting on tons of data at the moment, we like to bring in artists, we will give Matera Pandora to show them their music in the Music Genome Project, give them their data one on one, but we’d like to open that up, give data to artists, so they can better connect with artists.
Whose data has been the most surprising? We had this band called bronze radio return, many people probably know them now, but when we first got their album on Pandora, we put it in the Music Genome Project, we started circulating it, playing in a bunch of different places, audience connected with it, their story is meteoric rise because of the exposure where they were getting on Pandora. That’s one of my favorites.
We don’t like to play favorites, I don’t like to say who’s the most popular, I think the most spun last week was Drake, it is not our favorite but it is our audience’s favorite, I love Drake, but we don’t like to be taste makers, we don’t like to say that this band is better than that band. We like to promote everybody.
You’ve got all this information in music, you’ve got all this data on music, you’ve got so much access to music, Pandora one day would go, but that’s not the primary thing we’re thinking about, the main thing we think about is connecting people with music and artists with their audience.
Thank you so much for taking the time, we’ve been hanging out with a Eric Bieschke, chief scientist, go to Pandora, check it out, if you don’t have the app on your phone or on any other type of technological gadgets, you might own it, it’s amazing, it’s incredible radio.
What is your personal favorite playlist? Who are your top artists that you like making a playlist around? It’s Wax Taylor, check it out, it is something between hip hop, a little electronic and influenced downtempo, I dig Wax Taylor.