I’ve been listening to Pandora a lot recently, and am really impressed with the site’s features and interface. If you haven’t used the site, it’s a music player that recommends songs based on other artists and songs that you rate, similar to Yahoo’s Launch. The different thing about Pandora is that, instead of using other people’s ratings to recommend music like Launch does, Pandora uses data from the Music Genome Project to recommend songs that have similar characteristics to those that you rated as good.

While Launch will tell you it is playing Marah because you rated Bruce Springsteen 4 stars out of 5, Pandora will explain a song choice through something like this:

“We’re playing this song because it has basic rock song structures, folk influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, acoustic rhythm piano and mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation.”

The other day I was listening and Pandora played a few tracks off live albums, which got me thinking about the current paradigm for live album track delienation and how digital music has changed how we listen. When breaking up the tracks on a live music CD, it is custom to put any extraneous talking, non-musical crowd interaction and song introductions at the end of the previous track. This way, if a user skips to a particuar song, they get right to the song, yet the user who listens to the entire CD gets a smooth, complete experience. The digital age, however, brings us iPod’s “Shuffle Songs”, Pandora, Launch and even mix CDs. It’s a strange experience to hear a song, then another minute of talking, interaction or story that is probably not even related to that song before the “mix” moves on to the next track.

The solution, it seems, would be to break out any stories and such into a seperate track, so they aren’t lumped with other unrelated songs. This, of course, opens the door to those short talking tracks to show up on these mixes as well (I’ve actually heard a few “intros” on Launch in the past), which probably isn’t the best experience, unless of course you are Matt Nathanson.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 5:05 pm and is filed under web UI, digital music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.