When Apple unleashed the App Store, I made one of the world’s worst predictions. Over a slice of pizza, I told Dev Patnaik, with whom I was writing a book, that Apple would never permit non-iTunes music programs to show up on the iPhone. Too risky, might take away attention from the iTunes Store. “Even Pandora?” he asked. “Especially Pandora,” I said.
How wrong I was — the brilliant Pandora Radio for iPhone app, sporting iTunes integration, was released the very next day, and it has come to represent the random, serendipitous musical discovery Yin to the predictable, find-what-you’re-looking-for Yang of iTunes. It’s a must-have, and it has, by itself, made the iPhone and iPod touch dramatically better music players than the iPod ever was — in addition to being phenomenal portable computers.
As some measure of apology, I interviewed Pandora Radio founder Tim Westergen over at my other blog to find out what makes the company tick — and why its musical suggestions are so much more accurate than I’d expect any computer to ever be.
Q: There’s another side of this story that I’ve heard about, which is that to maintain the connection to the musicians you help promote, you actually hire a lot of musicians to work at Pandora. A: Yeah, the foundation of Pandora is this thing called the Music Genome Project, which is an enormous musical taxonomy. The thing about it is, it’s all hand-built. We have a team of about 35 working musicians, and they listen to songs all day and analyze what’s going on with them. For 9 years now, that’s become a pretty substantial number of artists.
Q: How many songs have been classified now?
A: A little over 600,000.
Pandora Radio’s made out of people! It’s people!!!
