Pandora

A leading music recommendation and Internet radio service from Pandora Media, Inc. (www.pandora.com). Pandora lets users create their own personalized radio stations by selecting a favorite artist and voting thumbs up or down on each song that is delivered. The more songs you hear and vote on, the more Pandora is able to fine tune the station to your preferences. Songs can be heard on the computer from the Pandora Web site or a smartphone. User selections made on the Web appear on the phone and vice versa.

The Music Genome Project

The heart of Pandora is the Music Genome Project that was started in 2000 by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft and Tim Westergren. It is a musicological study analyzing 400 attributes of a song, including melody, harmony, the singer's voice and instruments. Pandora uses its history of billions of thumbs up and down in combination with the music DNA to recommend songs. It should be noted that the "music DNA" has no relationship to the acoustic fingerprints used to identify a song (see acoustic fingerprint). See Last.fm, music recommendation service and music search.

Thumbs Up or Down

By voting yeah or nay on the songs Pandora recommends, the system is able to fine tune subsequent selections for each user. In addition, all the "those-who-like-this-also-like-that" history that Pandora collects helps make recommendations to other users better.

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