People love music. As a musician, that’s important to me. The way people get their music has changed considerably over the past several years, and as a lawyer, that is equally important to me. Ten years ago, music fans got the majority of their music from two sources: CDs and commercial FM radio. Today, CD sales have dropped dramatically (to under 50% of all music sales for the first time in 2010). Total revenue from U.S. music sales and licensing plunged to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999. This does not mean that music is less popular than before. It means that listeners have turned to different sources, including YouTube and digital streaming services such as Spotify, Rhapsody and Pandora Internet Radio. These services offer a novel opportunity for listeners to create customized “stations” tailored to their particular tastes in music. (Kind of a modern “mix-tape” for those of us old enough to remember cassette tapes.)
As both an entertainment lawyer and a musician, Pandora Internet Radio (commonly known just as “Pandora”) is particularly interesting to me. Pandora’s popularity has expanded greatly over the past few years: there are now over 150 million Pandora users. Recognizing that people choose to listen to music through a variety of devices, Pandora is available both as an internet version and as a mobile version (both for Android and Apple devices) and car manufacturers are even programming Pandora as a common option on their entertainment systems.
Unlike the other streaming services, Pandora utilizes a patented technology that it refers to as “The Music Genome Project.” Just as molecular geneticists have broken down the human genome into its constituent parts in order to better understand the makeup of the human body, genetics and the cause of diseases, the “Music Genome” breaks down music into a huge number of constituent characteristic pieces to create a musical map of recordings. Over four hundred different musical attributes are considered when selecting a song. These attributes are combined into larger groups called focus traits. There are approximately two thousand focus traits. Examples of these are rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies, proficiency on a particular musical instrument and the actual mix of instruments played. A listener sets a Pandora “station” by specifying a particular artist or song, or a combination of multiple items of any kind. Once set, a listener can tune into their list of newly created stations or, instead, can select other pre-made genre stations or other users’ stations.
After a station is selected, Pandora will play a track (either by the artist chosen by the listener, if applicable, or another artist that Pandora’s “Music Genome” technology predicts the listener will like). Each track played can be responded to with favorable (thumbs up) or unfavorable (thumbs down) buttons. These responses determine if the track should be played and how much should similarly classified songs be played in the chosen station. A second negative response to the same artist will remove that artist from the selected station unless the user has marked the artist positively on another occasion or if that artist is listed under the station’s variety. After a while, the station becomes more tightly focused in terms of the type of music preferred by the listener in that station, but with a broader array of artists. This is one of the really cool features of Pandora—the listener is exposed to artists with whom they are not familiar but might enjoy. It is also interesting to set up a new station with one of the suggested artists to see what other artists will be suggested after that.
I have found that Pandora works best when an artist’s musical output has some consistent qualities. For example, if a jazz artist has recorded both traditional bebop and smooth jazz, Pandora’s suggestions may be based only on a part of the artist’s musical output which may not be truly reflective of most of the artist’s work. For example, Dave Grusin, a talented jazz pianist, long has been known as one of the pioneers of the so-called “Smooth Jazz” movement. However, he has also released straight ahead jazz recordings that do not fit that label. Depending on which Dave Grusin recording is played first (and, of course, how it is then analyzed with Pandora’s technology), Pandora may either feed straight ahead jazz music or smooth jazz music. How a listener reacts (with a thumbs up or a thumbs down) can impact how the “Dave Grusin” station will be created.
In the next blawg post of this series, I will discuss the business and legal aspects of this changing marketplace for recorded music and, in particular Pandora’s business model. In the meantime, check out Pandora and start exploring the Music Genome Project.
For those curious about the reasons why people love music, check out this site: http://news.discovery.com/human/psychology/music-dopamine-happiness-brain-110110.htm
