What is pandora radio

To let us know, Pandora chooses a Ben Folds song at random and plays it for us. In the bottom portion of the player, we can see how the Music Genome Project has characterized this particular song see above. The next song the station plays will share some of those traits. In this case, it's "Amsterdam" by Coldplay.

Pandora automatically displays the Music Genome traits for the first couple of songs our new radio station plays. After that, we can find out exactly why Pandora is playing any song by clicking on the album art and choosing "Why did you play this song?

You probably notice in the above image that the trait description begins with "Based on what you've told us so far. Pandora wants us to give it feedback so it can refine the station based on our likes and dislikes. We can give any song the station plays either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down , and providing this feedback instantly changes the station's playlist. Let's say we don't care for "Give It All Away.

If we click on the arrow next to the Ben Folds Radio station and choose "Edit this station," we can see that Pandora has put "Give It All Away" on the list of songs we don't like. Giving a thumbs-up has the opposite effect -- that song and other songs like it will play more often. The idea is to continually provide feedback so the station learns more and more about what we like and don't like.

The result is a progressively personalized radio station that really does play only music we want to hear. It takes a while to get there, but most people agree that the feedback process works. Some of the other things we can do with Pandora include:. There's a lot going on with the Pandora player, but it's all pretty easy to access once you get the hang of where the clickables are. Next, we'll take a look at what's happening behind the scenes of the Pandora experience.

The Pandora player is a free, Web-based Flash application. You don't need to download anything to use it as long as you have Flash 7 or 8 installed on your computer. Everything else is the same. Pandora delivers a Kbps stream of music, and it only works with a broadband connection. First, Pandora will never play a specific song on demand; if you add a song to a station, it will show up eventually, but Pandora can only work it in at random.

Also, you can only skip 10 songs in an hour -- this is so you can't just skip to the song you're looking for. The license also limits the number of times Pandora can play a particular song or artist in a particular time period, and to this effect Pandora stores a list of the songs played on your station in your computer's Flash local storage so it knows what it has played already.

It also stores your user data there so it recognizes you when you arrive at Pandora. Probably the most interesting stuff going on behind the scenes has to do with the Music Genome Project that Pandora taps into.

Unless you've got a degree in music theory, most of the Genome's terms of analysis are outside the realm of common usage, but it's still cool to check out some of the parameters it's using to determine which songs are genetic matches for your seed song or artist. The Music Genome is not a single, homogenous set of traits. Different types of music require some different subsets of genes.

Speaking of profanity, an interesting side note: Pandora only plays the explicit version of songs. The people at Pandora discussed it at length and decided to stay true to the artists' original intentions. When you register for Pandora, you need to provide your date of birth, and maybe that's part of the reason why. So here's what happened behind the scenes when we created our Ben Folds Radio station: Pandora located a song by Ben Folds and pulled up the Genome analysis for that song.

It then ran an algorithm that compared every song in the Genome database to the genetic makeup of that song in order to identify songs that have similar traits. The algorithm looks for matches across parameters. Here's just a handful of the traits and concepts it looks at definitions excerpted from the Virginia Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary :.

Keep in mind here that every song's traits are determined "by hand. It's a profound undertaking that will probably continue for as long as Pandora Media has the money to pay its experts to listen to music all day. There are, of course, concerns about the Music Genome Project from some in the music world. First, since the Genome is proprietary, there's no possibility for independent review. For all we know, Pandora Media's "experts" don't know the difference between syncopation and vamping.

Also, in a much broader way, the Music Genome Project assumes that music's traits can be objectively analyzed at all -- that the mind of the listener can be left out of the equation. Robert Silva has extensive experience in consumer electronics and home theater product sales and sales supervision; he has written about audio, video, and home theater topics since Robert has articles published on HBO.

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn. Updated on August 24, Tweet Share Email. In This Article. What Is Pandora? Create Your Own Station. Six Reasons to Love Pandora. Pandora Free. Pandora Plus. Pandora Premium. Pandora Premium Family Plan. Is there a Pandora desktop app? Which devices will play Pandora? How do I turn off Pandora? Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error. Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up. There was an error.

Tell us why! More from Lifewire. How to Listen to Pandora Stations Offline. What Is the Last. Everything from instrumentation, voice, and melody to harmony, form, and rhythm. They hired 75 musicians to listen to dozens of songs each day and assign rankings for every single attribute with pen and paper. About a year later, they had identified and ranked minute musical details of over 10, songs in a massive excel spreadsheet.

The first song they plugged into the spreadsheet? An early Bee Gees song; which much to the inital dismay of Westergren was matched with a Beatles song. Despite a personal bias against the Bee Gees, Westergren admitted the song chosen by the spreadsheet was musically a perfect match. The project worked! Time to raise more funds and take the technology to the world. Or time to think again… Unfortunately, it was and finding funding especially funding for music in the midst of the Napster shut down was impossible.

In November they launched their full free service to the public and it exploded. Fueled by the smartphone revolution started in with the release of the iPhone. The world was finding and hearing music they had never heard before. He had a deep love of music and felt Pandora could reconnect and rekindle the worlds love of music.

We have a hard time staying connected to music. Pandora would allow people access to their favorite kind of music paired with an amazing discovery engine for finding new music The state and future of Pandora today? He hinted at a future quickly arriving where artists could pull up their listening stats for a city en route between big shows, quickly create a short ad about an impromptu show, have that ad air only to their listeners, and then play a performance to an intimate audience the same or next day.