Youth Radio - Topic: Pandora

What is Music?

nmartin — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 22:52:13 -0600

What is music? No really, what is music? This was my personal conquest for the past week or so. I can take a guess, but a guess wasn’t good enough for me, I wanted to understand music further with a definition, and personally I accomplished that. Where was the first place I went to find a definition? Google of course. I searched “definition of music,” and from wordnetweb.princeton.edu, I found: “an artistic form of auditory communication incorporating instrumental or vocal tones in a structured and continuous manner.” Mostly, this is a good definition. It is artistic, it’s a form of auditory communication usually through chord progressions or lyrics, and just about all the time, it uses instruments or vocal tones. I only have a problem with the “structured and continuous manner” part. Some may not find African drumming to be structured, and most of the time it’s not continuous, but it’s still music. Obscure thrasher metal songs may sound deafening or otherwise untasteful to the general public, but others may find this to be an art form that conquers others.

What really defines music is culture. You can’t deny that music is an art form, and art is mainly defined by the culture. For example, 17th century painting is much different than gangster rap, but still is considered art. It all depends on the culture surrounding it. Art is relative to culture.
I already had a musical epiphany with this discovery, but I still wasn’t totally satisfied. I then went back to Google and searched music. The three top sites Google came up with were music.yahoo.com, music.com, and pandora.com. Yahoo probably paid for their top spot, music.com directly matched my search and ended up being a junk pop music video site. Pandora.com was another story. If you don’t know, pandora.com is a site where you make your own “radio station” by inputting a song or artist that you enjoy. Pandora then runs this through its database and comes up with similar songs that you may also enjoy. You can press “like” or “dislike” depending on your opinion, and Pandora finds patterns with this data. The company who runs Pandora, the Genome Project, has their own definition of music. Every employee working there must have a four year degree in music theory and must be familiar in many different music styles. They analyze their music down to the bone. Musical roots, instrumentation, harmony and melody, genre influences, minor and major tonality, tempo and time signatures, and song structure are only some of the criteria they use to analyze their music. They believe there is a somewhat mathematical definition to each and every song that can be analyzed, quantized, and eventually organized.

Whether you believe in the cultural relativity theory, or the genome project’s more mathematical theory, there is no denying that music is an important part of normal life. From developed society comes music. Music I found was really hard to define, but I definitely learned from the experience.

Break It Down: How 12 - 24 Year-Olds Discover New Music

rgee — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 12:21:59 -0600

Ten years ago, Edison Research did a study called, "Radio's Future: Today's 12 to 24 Year-Olds.” The results were a “wake-up call” to traditional media institutions. Edison research released the results of a follow up study in September, 2010, analyzing how young people use radio, discover new music, use technology, and stay connected.

For their study, called “American Youth Study: 2010,” 1,533 respondents were interviewed about their media consumption and usage. Below are some of their findings. View the entire report here.

Radio continues to be the medium most often used for music discovery, with 51% of 12-24 year-olds reporting that they "frequently" find out about new music by listening to the radio. Other significant sources include friends (46%), YouTube (31%) and social networking sites (16%).

20% of 12-24s have listened to Pandora in the last month, with 13% indicating usage in the past week. By comparison, 6% of 12-24s indicated they have listened to online streams from terrestrial AM/FM stations in the past week.

More than four in five 12-24s own a mobile phone in 2010 (up from only 29% in 2000), and these young Americans are using these phones as media convergence devices. 50% of younger mobile phone users have played games on their phones, 45% have accessed social networking sites, and 40% have used their phones to listen to music stored on their phones.

Music tastes have shifted among 12-24s over the past decade: those radio listeners who indicated that Top 40/Pop stations were their favorite have more than doubled, while Alternative Rock stations were selected by half as many listeners in 2010 as in 2000.

YouTube The New Pandora?

denise — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:03:15 -0600

YouTube, the planet's leading video website, is adding a new feature catering to music video fans. YouTube calls it the “Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool.”

Type the name of your favorite artist and YouTube will give you a list of the performer's videos along with other, similar artists—it’s an attempt to create a video version of Pandora, which serious music heads know as the front-end of the ambitious music genome project Over at Download Squad, Jason Clarke noticed how YouTube groups their related artist section while trying to create his own playlist.

“The related artists list seems somewhat arbitrary; when I searched for Poison (hey, don't judge me), it came up with a list that included Bell Biv DeVoe, Beyoncé, The Prodigy, and at least 7 bands featuring the word "Poison" somewhere in their name. Looking a little deeper, the random-seeming artists all have a song with the word "Poison" in them. So clearly YouTube is using simple word matching instead of any sort of sophisticated algorithm to choose related artists.”

I haven't ran into Clarke's problem yet probably because I tried it with more well known artists like Beyonce and Eminem. I'm not sure if YouTube's Disco page works better with big acts, but so far I can tell I'm going to like it more than Pandora. This new tool allows you to jump around in the playlist, unlike Pandora. I like the mixtape feature because it lets you see the line up of what you're going to watch. You can also shuffle your playlist, allowing you to have more control over your viewing experience. I know I’ll be using this tool quite often.

Previously:

Why Pandora Won't Rewind

cfoster — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:00:44 -0500

Why can't you rewind or replay a song on Pandora.com? And when you type in the name of a song you want to hear, why will a different (but, yes, similar) song start to play instead? Argh, it's so annoying! But, it turns out, it's also the reason why the Web site can play those songs for free as a Webcaster. In the final installment of our latest Brains and Beakers series, Pandora's Tim Westergren devles into some of the nitty gritty of Web radio, a technology that, in his words, "just blew up."

Previously:

About Brains & Beakers

With support from the National Science Foundation, Youth Radio wants to change the way young people think about science--and scientists. What better way to do that than to make science a media event? Youth Radio joined forces with David Pescovitz from the website Boing Boing and the Institute for the Future to invite a stellar line-up of inventors, engineers, and investigators to our studios in Oakland, Calif. For each segment in the series, our guests provide interactive hands-on demos and then take questions from Youth Radio interviewers.

The Business of Webcasting

cfoster — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:34:39 -0500

There are many steps (and sometimes many years) before a good business idea becomes a good business. For the Web radio site Pandora.com, those steps included raising over $1 million from investors and spending five years building the Music Genome Project before it was ready to launch. In the fourth video of our latest Brains and Beakers series, founder Tim Westergren tells us how he made the move from musician to entrepreneur and how he maxed out his personal credit cards in the process.

Previously:

About Brains & Beakers

Web Radio on the Go

cfoster — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:02:52 -0500

Sure, Web radio sounds great when you're sitting in front of your computer, plugged in to the Internet. But what do you listen to on your commute to school or during your daily jog? Pandora's Tim Westergren says the increased popularity of mobile devices, like smart phones, has in turn boosted Web radio's reach. Watch the latest video in our Brains & Beakers series below.

Previously:

About Brains & Beakers

Pandora and the Rise of Webcasting

cfoster — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:45:15 -0500

In the second video from his Web radio workshop, Pandora founder Tim Westergren talks about how his Web site builds its song playlists and how webcasting is becoming more popular than broadcasting.

About Brains & Beakers

Your Favorite Music's DNA

cfoster — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:05:41 -0500

For our latest Brains and Beakers workshop, Youth Radio hosted Tim Westergren, founder of the online radio service Pandora.com. Tim studied recording technology at Stanford and has worked in the music industry for 20 years as a composer, musician and record producer. In 1999, during the height of the dot-com boom, he noticed that people were listening to more and more music online and wondered if there was a way to create a personalized web radio station that plays only songs that matched an individual listener’s tastes.

To do that, he launched the Music Genome Project – a collection of songs that have been analyzed one by one according to 400 musical attributes, like rhythm, harmony, and instrumentation. Their musical DNA, in other words. When you type a song you like into Pandora, the Web site plays songs with similar DNA. Call it compiling sonic taxonomy, sequencing musical phylogenetics… or just playing one hit after another.

In the first of five videos, Tim talks about how Pandora’s in-house musicians break down every song on the Web site into its musical characteristics. “Any piece of music, whatever the rhythm is, we can understand it through some combination of these attributes,” he says.

About Brains & Beakers