Summary:
Chapter 1 offers a bit of the bona fides whereby the author can claim to guide the reader through the varied terrain of musical taste: a behind-the-scenes historic tour of the initial music operation at the company now known as Pandora Radio—gained from his perspective as its chief musicologist, and the architect of the Music Genome Project. The chapter provides a play-by-play account of how a scrappy start-up called Savage Beast Technologies developed—in fits and starts—its unique music analysis technology under the author’s supervision, one that in time would help reshape the music industry. The account introduces the reader to the fascinating cast of characters involved in the company and unwinds the many challenges it faced in those early years—from its founding in 2000 to its transformation into Pandora in 2004 to more recent challenges of royalties and competition. The history of Pandora is admittedly a bit of a story within a story; yet, given the broad interest in the company and its place in our culture, and especially its relevance for how this book and many of the author’s ideas for it came into being, it is a reasonable place to get things started.
Supplements:
( Fuller quotation of letter from Pandora music analysts to Tim Westergren )
While we all greatly enjoy working here and firmly believe in our mission, the financial crunch is now hitting most of us quite hard. What had before been an inconvenience has become an untenable situation for some, and we need relief from our currently reduced pay… We realize that our resources as a startup in this economy are slim, and we are not out to tax those resources, but we feel that we are running more on faith than facts.
( More detail on royalty revenue from Pandora versus other radio media )
The fifty percent of total revenue paid by Pandora, by the way, stands in marked contrast to the revenue percentage paid out by satellite radio (around 7.5 percent) or terrestrial radio stations (0 percent); moreover, these “mechanical royalties” are distinct from the “performance royalties” paid to PRO’s like ASCAP or BMI, which for Pandora is about 1.75 percent of revenue. In response, in 2012, the company began an intense effort to influence new legislation—the Internet Radio Fairness Act, sponsored by Reps. Jason Chaffetz and Jared Polis in the House and Senator Ron Wyden in the Senate—to end the “willing buyer, willing seller” model behind the high rates; but after years of lobbying and appearances on Capitol Hill, Pandora finally abandoned the idea in November 2013.
Principal Bibliography :
Jonathan Van Meter, “What’s a Record Exec to Do with Aimee Mann?” New York Times , July 11, 1999.
Rob Walker, “The Song Decoders,” New York Times Magazine , October 14, 2009
Matthew Lasar, “Digging into Pandora’s Music Genome with Musicologist Nolan Gasser,” Ars Technica , January 12, 2011
Stephanie Clifford, “Pandora’s Long Strange Trip,” Inc.com, October 1, 2007
John Brandon, “Pandora Uses Machine Learning to Make Sense of 80 Billion Thumb Votes,” VentureBeat , July 12, 2017
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