Pandora

30Apr07

Pandora is an internet radio station that intelligently streams music customised to your tastes and preferences. The science behind Pandora is impressive. The experience is incredible.

All you have to do is type the name of an artiste or song you like. Based on this starting point, Pandora starts to stream similar songs (based on beat, rhythm, etc.). Hear something you don’t like? Give it the thumbs down. Hear something you like? Do the opposite. Pandora’s Box is “music to your ears”.

In web 1.0, the rage was Amazon. Amazon was able to tailor your shopping experience to your interests. All you had to do was start clicking on a few books and the site would start to “float” books of the same genre or similar books that other customers have purchased.

Amazon was the beginning of “implicit personalisation”, “explicit personalisation” and “collaborative filtering”. Though many have tried in 1.0, no one reached Amazon’s level of sophistication. What Pandora has done, is taken this whole idea and applied it to music. Pandora’s gone one step further – it has made the user experience so seamless it’s a pleasure to use.

The most aggressive music player in those days was Real Player. And it was all about pushing music out. We had nothing as intuitive and intelligent as Pandora.

Neat Stuff:

• Easy to use (super)
• Wizard-based interaction to understand your tastes
• Start as many stations you want to match your moods
• Intelligent
• Share stations you have created with your friends

End note: I love the name Pandora. I can only imagine that any branding consultant would have said it connotes something negative and it definitely shouldn’t be used.

Filed under: Music, Web 2.0   |  Leave a Comment