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Definition: Pandora


A leading music streaming and Internet radio service from Pandora Media, Inc. Pandora lets users create their own personalized radio stations by selecting a favorite artist and voting thumbs up or down on each song that is delivered. The more songs listened to and voted on, the more Pandora fine tunes the station to the user's music preferences. Songs can be heard on the computer or a mobile device.

The Music Genome Project
The heart of Pandora is the Music Genome Project that was started in 2000 by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft and Tim Westergren. It is a musicological study analyzing 400 attributes of a song, including melody, harmony, the singer's voice and instruments. Pandora uses its history of billions of thumbs up and down in combination with the music DNA to recommend songs. It should be noted that the "music DNA" has no relationship to the acoustic fingerprints used to identify a song (see acoustic fingerprint). See Last.fm, music recommendation service and music search.




Thumbs Up or Down
By voting yeah or nay on the songs Pandora recommends, the system is able to fine tune subsequent selections for each user. In addition, all the "those-who-like-this-also-like-that" history that Pandora collects helps make recommendations to other users better.