Free software: Pandora

Now that I listen to music again at work, I've been using Pandora heavily.

Pandora offers free music through freemium and advertiser strategies.  As you listen to songs, Pandora recommends structurally similar songs.  The ultimate idea is to introduce you to new music, something the founders are deeply concerned about.

Despite what I'm about to say, understand that I have greatly enjoyed using Pandora, and will gladly pay the $1 monthly fee.

Two aspects of Pandora's business, as described in a recent article, really surprised me.

First, their entire playlist only numbers 700,000 songs.  Even though some competitors have many more, it doesn't seem to be a limiting factor yet. 

More surprising is that they don't use or even plan to use the "wisdom of the crowd".  As a listener, I vote on whether or not I like the songs that are chosen for me.  If the users who liked "Stairway to Heaven" also tended to like "Paranoid Android", you could use that information to drive recommendations.  Pandora can use these links between songs, created by its user crowd, to build their song trees, just as web site linking builds the search lists on Google.

Instead, Pandora has professional musicians who decompose the structure of each song in hundreds of elements.  The next song recommended to you will have a similar structure. 

To me, that sounds ridiculous.*  

Mainly, I think Pandora is thinking too small.  They need to break away from thinking of music as driven by the record labels and more driven by music listeners.  Music is being decentralized like everything else, and they're in a unique spot to take advantage of it.

Pandora should just start adding songs with some high level categorization, let the votes roll in, and create links between songs that way.  Categorization could be done by letting its users tag songs.

Once you do that, there's an opportunity to become the youtube of music.  Small bands could upload their recording, tag it, and if enough people like it, slowly get more "airtime".  If people dislike it, it will fade into oblivion. 

Now, you're really introducing people to new music.  You draw people in with the established acts, and they end up listening to some genre-defying garage band from Podunk.  You can also scale up your playlist very quickly.

If you add a donation button, some mainstream acts would likely upload their songs too, particularly the vast, not well known middle tier.  Eventually, instead of paying 50% of their revenues to the record labels as they do today, record labels will be coming to them.

And if Pandora doesn't do it, someone else will, and will eat Pandora's lunch.

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* The manual labeling reminds me of the Open Directory Project -- an effort to create a "definitive catalog of the web" using manual labor.  While ODP, aka DMOZ, has been successful so far, I'll frankly be surprised if it's still around in 10 years.