Musings from the Backing Band – Volume 1
Hi, this is Ian, Vanessa's keyboardist / pianist. Vanessa has granted the rest of her band use of her blog space to talk about the behind the scenes goings on of the music and the band, so I thought I'd start things off talking about an amazing event we went to last night hosted by Pandora internet radio at the San Francisco MOMA.
For those of you who are familiar with Pandora internet radio (www.pandora.com), then you probably already know how cool this free service is. For those of you who've never visited their site, you should definitely head on out there as soon as possible.
Pandora has created a revolutionary new way for music lovers to listen to music and for independent artists to get heard. What's so revolutionary about Pandora's approach is that its playlists are generated entirely based on what the user wants to hear. (Who would have thought such a thing existed?) This compares to traditional FM radio playing what it thinks what we want to hear (or worse, telling us what it thinks we should want to hear).
Pandora's playlists are catered specifically to each individual listener, and are further refined by the individual's feedback.
How does this work? Pandora has created what it calls the "music genome project," where it has broken down the components of songs to over 130 different "genes," with each gene having a 1 – 10 scale for the musical characteristic or attribute it represents. (And 1 – 10 doesn't represent "bad to good," but in the case of vocal texture, 1 could mean super gravely and 10 could mean super airy.)
After all these attributes are assigned to every song analyzed, Pandora creates playlists based on the similarities of attributes between songs. So if I start a station based on Sarah McLachlan, it will create a playlist based on songs that share the closest characteristics of Sarah McLachlan. And based on the feedback I give it (Yes, I love that style, or No, I don't care for that aspect of Sarah McLachlan), it refines the playlist on the fly.
So this is awesome for the listener, since now you can get exactly the type of music you want to hear for whatever mood you're in.
But I mentioned that this awesome for the indie artist as well. How? Because Pandora doesn't look at what label you're on, how many records you've sold or how cool you look in your promo picture. It just looks at the musical makeup of your songs, and matches those with other similar artists and songs. Of the 40,000 artists they currently have in their database, Pandora estimates that 94% get airplay daily, with over 50% of the artists being independent or unsigned. Wow!
And if you're an unsigned artist, and you have music that sounds good, all you have to do is send them a CD (even on a CD-rom marked with a Sharpie), and they'll put into their music genome database.
So, besides getting airplay, what are the other benefits for artists?
Finding out who your audience is and finding similar bands to create synergies with. We submitted "Cotton-Poly Blend" to Pandora in late March and were up on Pandora a month later. Since then we've found a number of similar artists (such as Vienna Teng, Amanda Stott and Jen Foster) who we can try connect with and whose fans we can also try to connect with. After listening to Jen Foster on Pandora, I purchased her album "The Underdogs," and it only took my playing the first track for Vanessa when she said, "I'm now her fan!"
Given that Pandora matched our music with Jen Foster's, I wasn't too surprised.
So here we are now getting airplay with other established artists (and when I set up a Jen Foster station or a Vienna Teng station, it isn't too long before one of our songs shows…Cool!)
Oh, and at the meeting last night, they mentioned that Pandora listeners saw their music purchasing go up 40% once they started listening to Pandora and being exposed to new artists.
So, how big is Pandora in the overall scheme of things? Well, right now they are only 0.1% of total U.S. radio airplay. But on the web, they are currently the 3rd largest internet radio station and they estimate that they are around 1.5% of all web traffic. Think about that for a minute. Of all the millions of people on the web every day, they get 1.5% of that traffic (their user base is almost 7 million strong). So they have big plans to go beyond the web, starting right now.
Most of last night's event was a lead up to unveiling Pandora's plans for the future, some of which went into effect today. They first unveiled a new product from Sonos (www.sonos.com) that allows for Pandora to be streamed (and controlled) from any room in your home. But even more exciting was the news of Pandora being available just about anywhere outside the home (think about indie artists getting airplay without listeners being tethered to a stationary broadband network). This is available today to Sprint customers on their mobile phones. But Pandora is expecting city-wide WiFi and WiMax to become a reality in the next year or two, and are co-developing MP3 players that can stream internet radio wirelessly (of which they had a working prototype demoed last night).
This truly is radio for the people, connecting the artist directly to the listener who wants to hear that artist.
(So what are you waiting for artists, get your music to Pandora today! 360 22nd Street, Suite 440 Oakland, CA 94612)
And music fans, go out to www.Pandora.com and get a free account and start discovering new (and old) music that you'll love!