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. Read more...

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 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.
 

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. Read more...

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. Read more...

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.

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.

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.