Pandora
I’ve spent a few days now playing with the prerelease “friends and family” version of Pandora, the “music discovery service” demoed by Tom Conrad at Barcamp last weekend.
Summary
Some quirks, but overall really good, and easy to get going. Unlike some other services, I’ve been running it most of the time I’ve been at my desk for the past few days.
Discussion
My personal taste in music is simultaneously eclectic and encyclopedic in some areas, yet with odd gaps. Using Pandora, I’ve been able to think of one or two songs, albums, or artists that’s representative of what I want to hear, and it will come up with a fairly decent playlist of similar tunes.
Although I’m finding that I could have theoretically constructed the playlists by hand, it’s really easy to try dialing in a tune or two until Pandora starts queuing up something like what I had in mind. The music discovery part seems to work reasonably well too, it’s turned up a couple of new artists for me to check out later.
On the Pandora blog, there’s a post with assorted user feedback, feature wish list, etc. Here’s some of what I’d like to see:
Wishlist
- Playlist history (maybe with timestamps, like some of the radio stations provide), so I can go back and see what was playing a while ago.
- Playlist lookahead (so I can see what Pandora is queuing, to help decide if I want to skip ahead)
- Some mechanism for requeuing a past song in the future. I understand that at the moment, Pandora can’t provide a “backwards” function in the playlist, in order to avoid becoming an audio-on-demand service. On the other hand, having a method for indicating “I really liked this song and would like to hear it again” (or “I stepped away and mostly missed this song”) could be useful for the playlist queuing function. This may be handled by the “Guide Us” input form, not sure.
- Music parameter template - since Pandora is building the playlist based on similarity to the starting tunes, I’d like to be able to see how it’s characterized the starting point.
- Control over the parameter variation over time — I’ve let Pandora run for several hours at a time, and at times I’d like it to have wider variation over some aspect than others. For example, vary tempos gradually over several songs, but leave instrumentation and vocals more similar. Or vary instrumentation, but leave the tempo, echo, and bass / drums similar.
- Some kind of clustering of characteristics for a given artist or album might be helpful. I get the impression that if you start with an album or artist, the starting “genome” is an average or perhaps a median of the entire collection. I get reasonable songs for a while if I enter something like “U2″ or “Lou Reed”, or “Lenny Kravitz”, but if I start off a channel with a specific song I will get very different results (as expected), but which never turn up otherwise (not entirely expected, since these all span a wide range of “sounds”).
- Similarly, I might never want some combinations of characteristics to turn up on a given channel. So a way to specify the ranges or variances for a given “genome” parameter on a given channel would be handy.
- A “time period” selector or bias might be helpful. This might not work well since there’s a lot of re-released material.
- A progress bar and track info would be nice. Duration, artist, release info, link to iTunes, Amazon, etc
- A way to stream the Pandora audio into devices on the local network, i.e. Roku and similar network players
- A way to queue local audio data into the Pandora playlist, since I may have selections unavailable to Pandora
- A community track rating function and/or message board, for promoting interesting discoveries among site users, and perhaps as data for improving the playlist generating function
- Maybe a blacklisting function? Since the playlist is selected automatically by similarity, there can be interesting juxtapositions from a human listener’s point of view. I like that, but it might not work for everyone.
More data points:
- A sample channel built using “Steely Dan” comes up with a reasonable start, but repeats tracks fairly regularly within an hour or so
- A sample channel built using “Pat Metheny Group” is also reasonable, but repeats within an hour or so rather than moving to other albums.
These last points are easily fixed by using the “Guide Us” input form to select some additional starting points, but the playlist queuing function could probably use more latitude. I know the tracks are in the system, because I can use them as starting points as well, I just can’t get from “here” to “there” yet.
In addition to building playlists of music I know reasonably well, Pandora is turning out to be quite good at turning out electronica, techno, and club mixes, where I can throw in a couple of starting tracks and get back similar ones. I’ve already turned up a few tracks that I have heard, but didn’t know the artist or title. Since there’s often no artist, or the track is actually a DJ remix, Pandora provides a great way to find things. As a sample: starting with Gus Gus, Dirty Vegas, and Chemical Brothers turns up lots of similar, but different tracks.
Other early reviewers have mentioned Last.fm and Audioscrobbler. I ‘ve poked at these a little bit, but they’re geared more toward the social end and seem to require more upfront investment of effort. I think Pandora could ultimately benefit from the social functions, but it takes nearly zero time and effort to put together a very listenable channel or two. I’d probably find last.fm easier to use with something like Pandora spliced in as a selection filter, in addition to or instead of the user tags there.
Pandora is still in limited trial mode, but apparently I can invite 25 people from my trial account. Let me know if you’re interested!
If you’ve read this far, you should definitely check it out…
Update 08-26-2005 13:56 - In an e-mail to the prelaunch users, Pandora founder Tim Westergren announced that the service will be launched to the public next week. $36 for a full year of service, new users get a “short period” free, plus some changes based on user feedback. More at TechCrunch.
Update 11-10-2005 11:55 - Pandora is now free
Tags: streaming, media, music, pandora
