The Music Genome Project now has more than 400,000 songs in the database and over 2 million subscribers.
Pandora.com has only been online for six months. That's a staggering growth rate!
- (Side note: Legally they can only allow US residents to subscribe; they use zip codes to verify residence. According to their demographic statistics, Hollywood, zip code 90210, has 4 million residents.)
Here's a summery of the meeting along with some of my thoughts in Italics:
They are working on the Classic music genome and will have it available soon.
Near and dear to their hearts is giving unknown artists a chance to be heard.
If you seed a station with an artist, expect to go through a process of sorting out the different styles that artist has used. Imagine (pun intended) seeding a station with the Beatles.
They are aware of the tendancy of a station to morph into "mush" over time with the use of thumbs up and down.
- If you want a station to stay close to a style, seed it with a song instead of an artist and avoid the temptation to adjust it with thumbs up and thumbs down. You can add a track to your favorites if you want to capture it for future study.
The business plan, for now, depends mostly on advertising, with Amazon, iTunes, and paid subscriptions, helping. Tim mentioned that if you link to Amazon from their site and purchase music, they get a percentage, but if you stay on Amazon and buy anything else, they also get credit.
- They're not profitable yet.
A long range goal is to have universal access to their music.
- I think this is a long way off, but I would love to be able to listen to my stations on my commute.
- It occurred to me that they have a huge database of what we, the subscribers, are listening to, the same way Google knows what we're searching for. This disturbs me a little, but not enough to quit using Google or Pandora. The potential for database mining seems very high to me. I also worry that some deep-pocket, like Yahoo, will buy them out.
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