Pandora’s box doesn’t really have too much trouble when it comes to English music.
Disclaimer: This and the articles that follow are an attempt at understanding the music tech industry from a Product perspective. We do not claim to be experts in the field. All we claim is to be students of music tech. We hope this series will help others understand music tech and hopefully appreciate the industry.
I’m sure everyone has heard of the famous Pandora’s box of troubles, but the Pandora that we are currently talking about has different kind of troubles as compared to the ones in the box. Pandora currently has around 2 million songs on their platform. This number is 6% of what Spotify boasts about when it comes to number of songs on their platform. Pandora was started in 2000 which meant that they had a significant advantage on their competitors in terms of being the first one to penetrate the market while their competition only entered the market a couple of years later.
The primary reason for this? The Music Genome Project.
What is the Music Genome Project?
The Music Genome Project tries to capture the essence of music by using over 450 attributes to describe a particular song and using a mathematical algorithm to organize them. They have a team of specialized personnel working for this team who are experts in the field and they help categorize and tag music which helps them get amazingly accurate results for what people will like.
Pandora currently operates only in the United States. They used to operate in Australia and New Zealand but they stopped service as of July 2017. Pandora tries to boast of being able to give users a good list of recommendations. They do not want to be a Music discovery platform and have removed the ability to skip and replaced it with a Up Vote and Down Vote system. But from my experience it didn’t work for me. The music was too random for my liking.
I genuinely thought I would be amazed by Pandora. They boast of taking so much effort to make you listen to the music you want to. But after 2 days of continuously listening to music on it, there were a good number of songs that I didn’t like on each station. I was even pretty hard on the choices to make them fit the station I was listening to, but it seemed to have no effect on it. I love it when companies take the data approach to problems and get solutions. I personally thought that the Music Genome Project would instantly find songs I liked within a day or two, but nope. Funny enough that Spotify was recommending songs that I liked from day 1 and thats why I fell in love with it.
But from the music that I did hear, I found that most of the new hits and most songs were available on Pandora. A big drawback for me was that no Indian bands/artists were available. I think I personally prefer my own playlists/playlists specific to moods or genres over radio stations.
Am I being too hard on Pandora because of my love for Spotify? Maybe. But I feel like there is so much room for improvement on Pandora’s side. I love that they are trying something different, but I think that it isn’t working as well as they think it is. I didn’t like the general experience on the app and the “Not really being a music discovery platform” concept was a big disappointment for me.
Note: This is the second article among a series of articles that I will be writing related to the music tech industry under a publication called “Uncovering Music Tech”. Do let me know what you think. You can get in touch with me via LinkedIn Here, Instagram Here and my Twitter Here.
