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Seattlest Pix 09Nov08
Seattlest Pix 09Nov09
Can't Miss It: Monday
Last week, Pandora founder Tim Westergren joined 150 of his closest e-friends at EMP for a gabfest, and since we'd been hearing this 'n' that about Pandora recently, we decided to sit in. In fact, we co-sat, since Donte was going to Techcrunch later. While we were waiting for the start, we looked over the crowd to see who was into online radio: the split began 80/20 male-to-female but then worked its way to about 60/40 male-to-female. Is that irrelevant? Possibly. But we counted and we wanted the effort to be acknowledged.
So we were making a fruit smoothie with blueberries just before we went to the talk, and the resulting concoction's color made us think of Sheb Wooley's song "Purple People Eater" (though in this case, a person was eating the purple). Then, when we walked into EMP, the song "Purple People Eater" was actually playing. Later, we thought we'd complete the trifecta by seeing what kind of station Pandora would create based on "Purple People Eater" but it doesn't know that song and instead suggested "Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor" by the Big Bopper. Weird. That song seems way more obscure than "Purple People Eater," which was very big back in 1958.
Currently, Pandora has 400,000 songs (8,000 new are added each month) and, as we say, "Purple People Eater" isn't one of them so don't join yet if that's all you're looking for. Pandora is different from typical streaming radio in that each song in its database is evaluated according to 400 musical attributes -- this is what makes it interesting, too, because its purpose is not to tell you what is popular or what other people like who chose this or that band. It's about music and the fun of discovery. What it tries to do is find more music for you based on the evolving sound of what you like already. Westergren is a musician himself, and his hope is that Pandora can circumvent music label-style marketing and directly connect new bands with people most likely to appreciate them.
At this point, with 2 million registered listeners who have created 23 million stations, Pandora is free, supported by a mix of advertising (banners) and affiliate marketing (they link to iTunes and Amazon). 40% of listeners report buying more music, and more concretely, 10% of sessions result in a music purchase. Westergren apologized for the fact that under its webcast license, Pandora can't play songs "on-demand." But the core group who showed up were most interested in the genome of 400 musical traits, and how music was recommended to them. Like good web geeks everywhere, they wanted more transparency and control. Hopefully they won't get it. Only the truly obsessive would want to fiddle with the weights of 400 attributes. What is far more important is this lack of a Purple People Eater station, which would be the gateway to all your classic novelty songs. So we hope they will get on that. Schnell! Seriously.
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