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perezmv

http://oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2006/08/17/inside-pandora-web-radio.html - 0 views

oreilly.com/...inside-pandora-web-radio.html

Pandora howstuffworks music musical technology symbiosis format business model records experiments attributes project company analysts dimensions

shared by perezmv on 06 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Pandora (which is also the name of the company) grew out of the Music Genome Project, which company founder Tim Westergren began six years ago.
  • He became fascinated with the way directors described the music they were looking for, which led to his wondering what made people enjoy certain types of music. He asked himself, "If people haven't found any music that they love since college, and artists are struggling to find an audience, is there a role for technology to help bridge the gap?"
  • Westergren started the Genome Project from the idea of creating a platform for connecting people with music that they'll love based on music they already enjoy. The project uses experts called "music analysts" to deconstruct music into its fundamental parts and capture the results into a database. Pandora has 40 professional musicians who come to the office every day and listen to one song at a time, analyzing each in anywhere from 200 to 400 dimensions. (The dimensions are somewhat different for each genre of music.)
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Pandora chose the dimensions because they are quantitative. For instance, how breathy are the vocals? Is the music diatonic or chromatic? The music analysts are trained to be able to score songs consistently. In fact, one of the test cases is, "Could a group of 10 musicologists listen to a song and agree on one score for a particular element?"
  • vector space.
  • "What is exciting about the Music Genome Project, with respect to Pandora the radio-listening experience, is that by understanding the music on a song-by-song basis we can put together a playlist that has a much more natural ebb and flow than you might be able to do with collaborative filtering data," Conrad says.
  • "I think curator is the right word," Conrad replied. "Of all the financial models that could be leveraged to make Pandora a successful business, the 'play for pay' model runs completely spiritually opposite to the founding of the company.
  • I asked what Pandora was doing to avoid being influenced by big record labels, which have been widely accused of corrupting traditional radio through payola schemes.
  • "Since we use a human analyst to analyze song by song, we've experimented with using a smaller number of elements," he continued. "We've determined that you can't create interesting playlists with only 20 attributes. But we do keep an eye on machine listening as it might provide a way to augment the manual analysis."
  • I ask myself, "What's this song doing in my Bill Evans station? This song should be in my 'Soft Jazz Guitar' station. Why can't I tell Pandora to place this tune in the appropriate station?"
  • "It's fascinating to me that you raise that particular example," Conrad said. "Because the scenario that you just described is--after we evolved the product over five months and took a lot of low-hanging fruit off the table--probably the number-one listener request.
  • Pandora creates playlists with a "matching engine," written in C and Python, for each listener station. This engine builds the low-level linkage to the "source" music (the music that listeners indicate they like) and the music that actually gets played (a mixture of what the listener explicitly indicated, mixed with music that the Pandora service believes listeners will like). The replication system is Slony.
anonymous

Storytelling Theory and Practice - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

storytelling theory practice media education #ThoughtVectors robot socially assistive

shared by anonymous on 29 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 29 Jul 14
     
    Sturm argues that storytelling provides something larger: a way of organizing information. He says we can look at these characteristics as dots of data on a screen, where the story is the way we connect the dots. And how we connect the dots, changes the kinds of stories we create. Storytelling ethics and the need for trust and truth are discussed. Comments include his Story Listening Experience Model http://ils.unc.edu/~sturm/storytelling/storyexperience.pdf I wonder if this model could be used to create better programming routines for socially interactive storytelling robots? I have no idea how it would be possible to create a script for conveying ethics and the need for trust and truth using artificial intelligence. I think such activities require mediation by authoritative human participants to connect the dots and to establish a teaching presence that can address issues of ethics, trust, and truth for the listening audience upon reflection. I can easily see teachers, parents, caregivers "remix" what a storytelling robot presents to facilitate deeper reflection by young children in early childhood classrooms.
brookerobinson

Listening to Classical Music Ameliorates Unilateral Neglect After Stroke - 0 views

ajot.aota.org/article.aspx

listening music

shared by brookerobinson on 27 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Participants generally had the highest scores under the classical music condition and the lowest scores under the silence condition. In addition, most participants rated their arousal as highest after listening to classical music.
    • brookerobinson
      brookerobinson on 27 Jun 14
       
      would their own music genre prove better or worse than classical?
wstrahan

Spotify, YouTube, Streaming Services Are Killing Digital Downloads | TIME.com - 0 views

business.time.com/...st-killing-digital-music-sales

youtube spotify digital music sales

shared by wstrahan on 03 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Now, with a deluge of  music streaming services letting fans listen to songs for free, the digital download may be going the way of the CD and the cassette tape before it.
  • U.S. digital track sales decreased for the first time ever in 2013, dropping from 1.34 billion to 1.26 billion, according to Nielsen SoundScan. CD sales also continued their ongoing decline, dropping 14 percent to 165 million. Digital album sales were stable, staying at 118 million sold last year. Meanwhile the number of songs streamed through services like Spotify, YouTube and Rhapsody increased 32 percent to 118.1 billion.
  • Spotify just arrived on U.S. shores in the summer of 2011, but it has become a lightning rod for controversy thanks to a chorus of artists who decry that paying musicians a fraction of a cent per listen is unfair.
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  • Digital downloads were a logical continuation of the business model that generated fat profits for record labels in the heyday of physical music stores. In some cases, with no manufacturing or distribution costs involved, a hit digital album could actually be more lucrative than a physical CD.
  • However, the music industry’s core problem—that lots of fans just don’t want to pay for music—remains an issue. Most people use the free, ad-supported version of Spotify, and the company recently expanded its free offering to mobile devices. The most popular platform for listening to music among young people is YouTube, which is almost entirely free.
  • U.S. digital track sales decreased for the first time ever in 2013, dropping from 1.34
perezmv

Pandora Internet Radio hits two million listeners in Australia and New Zealand - mUmBRELLA - 0 views

mumbrella.com.au/s-australia-new-zealand-239096

technology Pandora success interactive channels evolving

shared by perezmv on 18 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • It’s clear that radio is evolving – and this evolution is being propelled by consumers and technology
  • Key to Pandora’s success, is that we offer listeners an interactive and social experience that is incredibly personal, and artists a channel to be discovered by a new legion of fans
Will Sullivan

The Radio as New Technology: Blessing or Curse? A 1929 Debate » - 0 views

americainclass.org/lessing-or-curse-a-1929-debate

augmentedreality

shared by Will Sullivan on 27 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Accommodated as we are to mass media, we must work to imagine the impact of commercial radio broadcasting in its early years. From the late 1800s, new electronic devices had been expanding the realm of shared human experience — people conversed on telephones, sent news through telegrams, played records on phonographs, and enjoyed films in local theaters. But until the radio, nothing offered such widely shared simultaneous mass experience. By turning on your radio set, you could listen to a jazz band, baseball game, religious service, even a president’s speech, live, along with millions of fellow listeners.
  • Will Sullivan on 27 Jun 14
     
    An excerpt from an old criticism of the radio in the 1920s. Sound familiar?
perezmv

Pandora Pulls Back the Curtain on Its Magic Music Machine | Fast Company | Business + I... - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...urtain-its-magic-music-machine

Pandora howstuffworks music people employees company profit listeners components analysts Westergren

shared by perezmv on 06 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • "It’s true that the algorithms mathematically match songs, but the math, all it’s doing is translating what a human being is actually measuring," says Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora in 2000 and now serves as its Chief Strategy Officer. “You need a human ear to discern.”
  • Pandora’s secret sauce is people. Music lovers.
  • "That is the magic bullet for us," Westergren says of the company’s human element. "I can’t overstate it. It’s been the most important part of Pandora. It defines us in so many ways."
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  • It’s also important, at least in the beginning, for these music analysts to sit, physically, in the same room. That way, they can regularly peel back their headphones and engage with their colleagues about the music they’re categorizing.
  • (Pandora reportedly met with bankers recently about a $100 million offering)
  • "We want Pandora to feel like it’s talking to you," Westergren says. "We also literally talk to people. We have a team of people who are called listener advocates. Their job is just to respond personally to every single email, phone call, or letter we get. The identity of Pandora is forged through those collective interactions."
  • Pandora turned its first profit at the end of that year, earning $50 million in total revenues.
  • Analysts predicted 2010 would end with $100 million in revenues for Pandora--Westergren declined to confirm or deny the number, saying only of revenue, "It’s all going in the right direction."
brookerobinson

This is your brain on music - CNN.com - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...brain-music-research

brain music

shared by brookerobinson on 27 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The results: The patients who listened to music had less anxiety and lower cortisol than people who took drugs. Levitin cautioned that this is only one study, and more research needs to be done to confirm the results, but it points toward a powerful medicinal use for music.
  • Among participants, the researchers found synchronization in several key brain areas, and similar brain activity patterns in different people who listen to the same music. This suggests that the participants not only perceive the music the same way, but, despite whatever personal differences they brought to the table, there's a level on which they share a common experience.
wstrahan

Literature Resource Center - Document - 0 views

go.galegroup.com.proxy.library.vcu.edu/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort=RELEVANCE&inPS=true&prodId=LitRC&userGroupName=viva_vcu&tabID=T006&searchId=R1&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSegment=&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&currentPosition=3&contentSet=GALE%7CA290630533&&docId=GALE|A290630533&docType=GALE&role=LitRC

Spotify piracy music

shared by wstrahan on 08 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Sam Rosenthal, who's the founder of a label called Project Records
  • iTunes and the other music players have had in the past; buying to own
  • Spotify really is changing here is we're talking about access to music.
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  • if they really like it they will share it and their friends will discover it and they in turn will listen to it
  • Daniel Ek is the founder and CEO of the music streaming service Spotify
  • But again, what I sort of emphasize that we're paying the labels. We don't pay the artists directly.
  • What we're really trying to do here is move people away from piracy into a legal model that contributes revenue back to the music industry.
  • Yeah, I do want to address that because I feel that it's important to mention that it's still early days and Spotify's only two years in using the service, almost three. But in that short period of time now we've become the second largest revenue generator for the labels in Europe and we've paid out more than a 150 million dollars back to the music industry.
  • He recently wrote on his blog that 5,000 plays on Spotify generates a little more than six dollars, and in comparison 5,000 track downloads at iTunes generates for him $3,400. I mean, it's a big gap there.
  • I definitely think that we want to have access and that's the big shift here, but I do think that ownership still plays an important role. You do want to own the things you really care about.
  • At the same time one of the big criticisms that we've heard from artists is that the royalties that they get from Spotify are so low that it might as well be piracy.
  • I think if you keep creating great music people will in fact listen to it and they will in fact buy it if they think it's a great record.
wstrahan

Literature Resource Center - Document - 0 views

go.galegroup.com.proxy.library.vcu.edu/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort=RELEVANCE&inPS=true&prodId=LitRC&userGroupName=viva_vcu&tabID=T006&searchId=R1&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSegment=&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&currentPosition=11&contentSet=GALE%7CA334728115&&docId=GALE|A334728115&docType=GALE&role=LitRC

pandora royalties internet radio

shared by wstrahan on 08 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Morgan's an independent musician and his song "Better Angels" was among a number of his songs that got some 28,000 plays on Pandora.
  • The song earned $1.62 in royalties over a 90-day period on Pandora, which is a very typical rate.
  • Pandora, which is the number one Internet radio service, saw over $125 million in revenue last quarter, 55 percent more than the year before. But the company still isn't profitable in part because it pays over 60 percent of its revenues to acquire music.
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  • But the future is clearly in Internet radio services like Pandora. According to a survey by the NPD Group, people under 35 spent a quarter of their listening on the Internet in 2012 - that's up 17 percent from the year before. Time spent listening to radio went down 2 percent. At the same time, people are purchasing less music.
perezmv

Pandora - Investor Relations - News Release - 0 views

investor.pandora.com/phoenix.zhtml

technology pandora technologists growth company

shared by perezmv on 18 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Both have established impressive track records leading Pandora’s strong team of technologists.
  • “I’m excited to promote two top technology leaders to these important positions.
  • Mr. Conrad has led Pandora’s engineering and product organization from the product’s inception and has guided the team as they delivered increasingly sophisticated playlist techniques, mobile, consumer electronics and in-car listening technology, as well as sophisticated advertising solutions
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  • “Our team of engineers has developed some of the most innovative music technology in the world and changed the way we all consume music,” said Chris Martin, Pandora’s new Chief Technology Officer. “Tom and I have built an incredibly strong team, and I am energized by the opportunity to help Pandora drive forward the future of radio.”
  • “Pandora created the most effective way for music and technology to enhance the lives of music fans and artists alike,” said Mr. Conrad. “As a company, Pandora has always been driven by that intersection between creativity and technology. I am proud to have been a part of this effort, working with an incredibly talented and creative group of technologists. Everything I wanted to know about following one’s passion and running a business I learned at Pandora.”
  • “As Pandora continues to grow, we need to ensure our technology resources are optimized to deliver the best experience possible for listeners, partners and advertisers.”
perezmv

How Pandora Avoided the Junkyard, and Found Success - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...08pandora.html

technology Pandora success music stations

shared by perezmv on 18 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Pandora’s 48 million users tune in an average 11.6 hours a month. That could increase as Pandora strikes deals with the makers of cars, televisions and stereos
  • At the end of 2009, Pandora reported its first profitable quarter and $50 million in annual revenue — mostly from ads and the rest from subscriptions and payments from iTunes and Amazon.com when people buy music.
  • Its library now has 700,000 songs, each categorized by an employee based on 400 musical attributes, like whether the voice is breathy, like Charlotte Gainsbourg, or gravelly like Tom Waits.
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  • Some music lovers dislike Pandora’s approach to choosing music based on its characteristics rather than cultural associations.
  • “It’s not just that this has an 80-beat-a-minute guitar riff,” he said. “It’s that this band toured with Eddie Vedder.”
  • For Pandora and its listeners, it was a revelation. Internet radio was not just for the computer. People could listen to their phone on the treadmill or plug it into their car or living room speakers.
  • In January, Pandora announced a deal with Ford to include Pandora in its voice-activated Sync system, so drivers will be able to say, “Launch my Lady Gaga station”
perezmv

Pandora takes aim at local radio advertisers : Business - 1 views

www.stltoday.com/...05-5a66-a7ba-c1a954d903e0.html

pandora advertising advertisements competition

shared by perezmv on 27 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • In March, Pandora hired local sales staff in St. Louis as part of its strategy to court local advertisers, and it’s had success out of the gate landing customers. Don Brown Chevrolet, Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis University and Panera Bread Co. are just a few of the advertisers that have booked ads on Pandora so far this year.
  • It’s spent the past two years expanding its sales staff nationwide.
  • Its regional sales staff of 60 employees nationwide is growing, and Pandora plans on ultimately having an office in each of the top 50 radio markets.
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  • “Radio is a very unusual media form in that most of its revenue comes from the local market,” said Rich Tullo, director of research at New York brokerage Albert Fried & Co. “The ad rates are higher because it’s local. Ultimately, it will take dollars away from other radio stations.”
  • 72.7 million active monthly users.
  • For those who listen to Pandora on their smartphones or laptops, they’re prompted to enter their ZIP code, year of birth and gender. Users can select the artists’ music they want to hear, and Pandora adds similar music.
  • “We have one-fourth the number of ad units that a traditional FM station has, so your ad will stand out more,”
  • Pandora has yet to post an annual profit.
  • has more than 70 percent market share in the U.S. Internet music segment,
  • St. Louis radio station managers say they haven’t seen a decline in their ad revenue since Pandora entered the market, but they’re watching the new competitor closely.
perezmv

DailyTech - Pandora Increases Monthly Subscription Fee, Kills Off Annual Subscription O... - 0 views

www.dailytech.com/...article34555.htm

Pandora profit advertising memberships advertisingversusmemberships companyproceeds

shared by perezmv on 27 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • According to Pandora's blog, new Pandora One users will see a price increase from $3.99 to $4.99 per month come May 2014. Existing customers, however, will stay locked into the $3.99 per month price for now
  • "Over this same period, the costs of delivering this service have grown considerably. For example, the royalty rates Pandora pays to performers via SoundExchange for subscription listening have increased 53% in the last five years and will increase another 9% in 2015."
brookerobinson

8 Surprising Ways Music Affects and Benefits our Brains - The Buffer Blog - 0 views

blog.bufferapp.com/music-and-the-brain

#music #brain

shared by brookerobinson on 27 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • our brains actually respond differently to happy and sad music
  • hat after hearing a short piece of music, participants were more likely to interpret a neutral expression as happy or sad, to match the tone of the music they heard.
    • brookerobinson
      brookerobinson on 27 Jun 14
       
      look deeper into this - maybe inmates? patients?  how does music work in extreme situations
  • moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • children who had three years or more musical instrument training performed better than those who didn’t learn an instrument in auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills.
  • cyclists who listened to music required 7% less oxygen to do the same work as those who cycled in silence.
    • brookerobinson
      brookerobinson on 27 Jun 14
       
      Look in to see if it is any music or a certain type.
  • cyclists
wstrahan

Pink Floyd: Pandora's Internet radio royalty ripoff - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...2447445

pandora internet radio royalties ripoff

shared by wstrahan on 08 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The latest example is how Pandora is pushing for a special law in Congress to slash musicians' royalties – and the tactics they are using to trick artists into supporting this unfair cut in pay.
  • We hope that many online and mobile music services can give fans and artists the music they want, when they want it, at price points that work. But those same services should fairly pay the artists and creators who make the music at the core of their businesses.
  • Nearly 90% of the artists who get a check for digital play receive less than $5,000 a year. They cannot afford the 85% pay cut Pandora asked Congress to impose on the music community.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Last year, we joined over 130 other bands and artists to oppose Pandora's campaign to cut the royalties paid for digital radio spins.
  • We've heard Pandora complain it pays too much in royalties to make a profit. (Of course, we also watched Pandora raise $235 million in its IPO and double its listeners in the last two years.) But a business that exists to deliver music can't really complain that its biggest cost is music.
  • Netflix pays more for movies than Pandora pays for music, but they aren't running to Congress for a bailout.
  • Everyone deserves the right to be paid a fair market rate for their work, regardless of what their work entails.
brookerobinson

The power of music - 1 views

brain.oxfordjournals.org/...2528.full

music brain

shared by brookerobinson on 27 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Anthony Storr, in his excellent book Music and the Mind, stresses that in all societies, a primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together
  • People with Tourette's syndrome—including many I know who are professional musicians—may become composed, tic-free, when they listen to or perform music; but they may also be driven by certain kinds of music into an uncontrollable ticcing that is entrained with the beat
  • There is a wide range of sensitivity to the emotional power of music, ranging from virtual indifference at one extreme (Freud was said to be indifferent to music, and never wrote about it), to a sensitivity that can barely be controlled. Individuals with Williams syndrome, for example, though they have severe visual and cognitive defects, are often musically gifted, and usually extravagantly sensitive to the emotional impact of music. I have seen few sights more extraordinary than a group of 40 young people with Williams syndrome breaking into uncontrollable weeping at tender or sad music, or uncontrollably excited if the music is animated.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • speaks of ‘chills’ in this connection, and has shown some of the specific neurobiological basis of these
    • brookerobinson
      brookerobinson on 27 Jun 14
       
      religious music "chills" from the holy spirit
  • Perseverative music has much more the character of a cerebral automatism, suggesting cerebral networks, perhaps both cortical and subcortical, caught in a circuit of mutual excitation. I do not think there are comparable phenomena with other types of perception—certainly not with visual experience. For instance, I am a verbal creature myself, and though sentences often permute themselves in my mind and suddenly surface as I am writing, I never have verbal ‘earworms’ comparable with musical ones.
perezmv

Clear Channel built iHeartRadio into massive streaming radio service - 0 views

fortune.com/...adio-clear-channel-bob-pittman

technology Pandora iHeart comparing success FM radio

shared by perezmv on 18 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Pandora continues to grow with 250 million registered users
  • There are one billion FM radios in the US and 160 million smartphones and 160 million PCs, so it’s still a subset of the FM marketplace.
  • Pittman doesn’t believe streaming hours will overtake traditional radio in his lifetime.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “Music collections always replace each other and radio always tends to be yet another choice,” he says. “Satellite didn’t kill FM. AM didn’t kill FM. (Streaming music) one more choice and one more device you can listen to the radio on.”
  • digital is an important growth area for the business, even if the $17 billion or so that advertisers spend on radio each year is slow to move over to the Web.
  • In 2012, Clear Channel made strange bedfellows when it joined forces with Pandora to lobby Congress to lower the rates their services were required to pay artists to stream their music online. The companies eventually backed down from that effort in order to focus on a different political tact.
  • Online, people “tend to have a favorite and then they bounce around a couple different services,”
marikejp

How Facebook Beat MySpace - Forbes - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...why-facebook-beat-myspace

facebook social media

shared by marikejp on 17 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • not only an early internet success – but a seminal web site for the movement we now call social media. 
  • very simple management mistake News Corp. made.  News Corp tried to guide MySpace, to add planning, and to use “professional management” to determine the business’s future.  That was fatally flawed when competing with Facebook which was managed in White Space, lettting the marketplace decide where the business should go.
  • If you have an idea for networking on something, Facebook pushed its tech folks to make it happen.  And they kept listening.
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