Open Up a Free Web 2.0 Music Player for the Holidays: Or, Why You Won't Put Pandora Back in its Box

by Robert Baird, Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies
Coordinator of Instructional Development, CITES EdTech

We thought we'd offer our educational technology friends a fun, festive web toy for the holiday break.

When I'm in the garage tinkering around I like to use my old music technology: my early-1980s receiver and record player. Cranking up the Allman Brother's Eat a Peach on vinyl in a garage has a certain symmetry to it. However, when I'm out and about and riding my bike, I'm much happier to use the new technology of the iPod. I have music on my iPod, but I tend to listen to National Public Radio programming and pod-casts on science, history, and media topics. The newest music technology I employ, however, is a Web 2.0 music player called Pandora. Remember when Internet radio was dominated by the fear and dread and news of Napster, imprisonment for young and old alike downloading illegal music, ripping and burning music pirates?! That's all pretty much old news now with improvements and diversification of Internet radio, and the development of web players like Pandora.

Pandora solves the Napster issue by paying streaming music royalties through subscription (3 months = $12; year = $36) or through a free, advertising-supported model. Pandora does best on broadband, and requires the nearly ubiquitous Flash player, itself an easy, free download. The user simply visits pandora.com, signs up with an email address and password, and then selects an artist or particular song to begin listening.

Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to match your initial choice with other songs and artists. By giving a thumbs up or down for particular songs and artists as one listens to Pandora, the user can fine tune her "stations." Some of my stations are pretty obvious, like "Van Morrison Radio," and "Clash Radio," and "Jack Johnson Radio." Note, however, that a station based on an individual artist, say Bruce Springstein, will play music from the Boss, but will quickly lead you to artists similar to Springstein. So, you can't use Pandora to play Led Zeppelin 24X7; for that, you'll need to stick with your iPod or vinyl collection. Pandora won't allow stations based on a single artist for two reasons: (1) it's illegal since streaming radio forbids music on demand and (2) the Music Genome is all about providing users with new musical discoveries. Pandora, then, is great at providing music of very different moods, without simply playing the same artist all day long.

The design of Pandora encourages narrowcasting and personalization, hallmarks of the Web 2.0 media revolution. My most idiosyncratic stations are "Omara Portuondo " (legendary Cuban singer, who allowed me to discover other great classic Cuban music stars), and "Hoagy Carmichael" (jazzy pianist who wrote "Stardust" and appears in To Have and Have Not with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall), and "Beyond the Sea" (as in Bobby Darin's version of the Jack Lawrence and Charles Trenent song). Similar to iTunes, the user can click "quick mix" and randomly play from all stations. As with many other Web 2.0 gadgets, Pandora will let you email and share your stations with friends. Since the user gets to vote on songs and can add songs or artists to expand the types of music on a particular station, each station can be as narrow or broad as one would like. However, it's better to have numerous, narrowly defined stations that one can choose based on one's current mood or interest, rather than having a very broad station, which would start to sound like bad, traditional radio, which is all over the place and, well, no place at all. (Helpful tip, here: Pandora requires some voting to operate, but please don't slavishly vote on each and every song, as a friend of mine did when first using Pandora, just vote whenever you feel the urge to say "not that" or "yes, I really like that.")

There are a number of things I really appreciate about Pandora that I believe distinguishes it from my phonograph, my iPod, traditional radio, and even Internet radio. For one thing, although the Music Genome Project sounds like a pretty cool marketing ploy, it is actually a serious attempt to quantify, catalog, and compare the intrinsic musicality of a particular artist or song. The folks at the Music Genome Project do this by identifying as many as 200 attributes for pop songs and over 400 attributes for jazz, hip hop, and Latin tunes. The result is that Pandora becomes like that rare friend or highly knowledgeable music salesperson (do we still have any of those?) who can recommend great songs and artists that you've literally never heard about. Pandora dubs itself "a musical discovery service," and they can legitimately lay claim to the moniker. At one point I wanted to be a professional musician, still have 5 or 6 guitars laying around, but still learn something new from Pandora each time I listen. The Music Genome Project's commitment to building musical knowledge can be seen in their new podcast series, which aims to elucidate musical topics such as "The Basics of Vocal Harmony." Another neat feature is that each song that comes up offers a quick link to smart and comprehensive artist biographies and discographies in the Pandora "backstage" area. In this way, Pandora is an education in itself about the influences and connections of many musical styles and artists. We mentioned Pandora was essentially free to users thanks to advertising, but unlike television and old radio and other web sites, Pandora doesn't stop playing music to play commercials! It simply wraps its player in sometimes interesting advertisements. Once a user launches the player she can, of course, launch another browser window, browser tab, computer program, and so forth, and continue to work with Pandora playing in the background.

Lastly, the very best feature of Pandora is the heart of its design: user selected "stations," up to 100 of them, which can be as specific or as broad as the user wants. Do I need to remind of the horrific state of most traditional radio stations, with repetitive playlists created from some number-crunching algorithm based on sales potential? Unlike most traditional, mainstream radio, Pandora suggests an intelligence behind the selected music, an intelligence that begins with the user's initial choice, continues to evolve through subsequent voting, and continuously meshes with the careful, elaborate, indeed, music-loving music catalogers at the Music Genome Project.