As a musician myself, it has been very easy for me to put my own music on MySpace, iTunes, Amazon-On-Demand and Facebook. Obviously, I too want to put my music on Pandora but there is a long drawn-out process .
Do you think this could possibly reverse the grassroots nature that the independent music industry has been moving toward?
This is interesting because Pandora filters out unsigned upcoming artists based on whether they find the music to be "uniquely compelling."
ReplyDeleteSo unsigned artists that Pandora employee do not find compelling, have no chance until they are signed or have a large enough fan base requesting their songs by name
Exactly! So, what about the Wisdom of the Crowd?
ReplyDeleteThat's why I think Pandora is reversing what's been happening in the independent music industry with a shift towards grassroots promotion and giving everyone a chance.
Pandora uses what they call the Genome project. Under this system, every song gets up to 400 tags about various characteristics (i.e. Acoustic or Electric, Female or Male vocals). Pandora then tracks user preferences when they Like or Dislike a song to match more songs with similar characteristics to the user. So why not stock up on more options for the users?
In everything we studied about The Long Tail, we learned about companies who achieved their success by not ignoring the 80% that make up the last 20% of revenues (i.e. Amazon.com)
The only cost to Pandora of adding new music is the storage of a single song and the time it takes to listen to the song and tag it. You can essentially say that the time is not an added cost because someone listens to it anyway to determine whether or not it is "uniquely compelling".
I believe Pandora should open up and let users decide what they want to listen to, a business model that doesn't utilize user input will not last in this day and age.
This is a great post, Sheehan! I agree that Pandora's limiting factor is that it doesn't provide exposure to new and emerging artists. But I guess that's why there's a need for social networking websites, such as MySpace and iTunes. They have the platform and reputation to showcase emerging artists. One possible solution to this lack in Pandora's ability to stream music from emerging artists is for MySpace and/or iTunes to begin providing the streaming services similar specific to emerging artists to Pandora. There's definitely a huge opportunity here for one of these media giants to capitalize on!
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