Parading Shift in Music
This month I will introduce you to Pandora.com and its paradigm shifting way of serving music. Although many people still purchase their music in the form of a CD at the local retail store, people are beginning to move to more convenient ways of consuming music. Ever since the internet became mainstream and everyone began to use it more and more, music consumption started another phase of its evolution.
History
In the mid 90’s the MP3 file format was created giving a way to compress music tracks to a more manageable size than the original track in a CD, which are typically 10 times larger. The MP3 format is able to accomplish this by not only applying compression, but by eliminating sound that the typical person is not able to hear. The internet explosion helped to propel the MP3 format forward and by the end of the decade became the most popular standard for storing most music tracks in a size that the typical computer could handle in scale.
Portability
Soon MP3 CD players came into the scene, being able to store about 15 typical albums or about 256 songs. Back then hard drives were physically too big and solid state memory was too expensive. MP3 CD players are still around and many after-market automobile CD stereos are able to read MP3 formatted CDs.
When the price of memory came down and the physical size of hard drives was brought down to a manageable size, a variety of MP3 players surfaced. There were some growing pains associated with the first versions of these players. They often were too dense and heavy or outright too big. Their interface was complicated, hard to use, and not at all intuitive.
Apple introduces the iPod
In 2001 the iPod was released as a refined version of the numerous MP3 players out before it. Its ability to dynamically organize your music and the very convenient way to purchase music made it the leading player soon after.
Evolution
The iPod soon evolved and build on the technology pioneered by its competitors by refining their methods and providing an intuitive simple way for users to access and play not only their music, but videos and movie files as well. Today you can buy music with one click and even rent movies.
Storage
Storage is a common link between all MP3 players in the industry. Storage has been a problem since the beginning of the first record player. The more storage you have the more music you can listen to and vice versa. This dogma has been plaguing the music player since the beginning. Desktops have been streaming for a while, but streaming really came into the mainstream with the introduction of the iPhone and now more phones have since harnessed the ability including the BlackBerry. By streaming music storage problems become mute.
Streaming
Though genre internet radio has existed since the mid 90’s, custom radio is fairly new. The leading two services as of this writing are last.fm and Pandora.com. These services are ad supported and as a result are essentially cost free, but it’s not to say that the services will blast you with ads. The ads are very well presented in a way which doesn’t detract from the experience in an overbearing way.
Social & Genre Music Streaming
Pandora.com and last.fm both are taking streaming radio to next level by implementing sophisticated algorithms. Algorithms which themselves not only take into account genre, artist, song, and music instruments, but also taking into account it’s users’ voting preferences. Notice it’s not a rating it’s like, don’t like, or indifference vote that it takes from the user. It takes all the voting from all the users and produces a very accurate playlist from a simple input of a song or artist name.
Pandora in addition to the above also implements what it calls the Music Genome Project. This project takes input from music professionals to define what it calls the DNA of a song and tries to classified all the music played in Pandora.
Pandora.com provides a very easy way to try and use. When you first visit the site you’ll be asked for a song or artist name to be inputted. It quickly sets up a radio station customized for you, seeded by your selection and the music begins. Last.fm is similar but not as simple. Both offer a way to register for free and doing so provides the benefit of remembering the stations you’ve created and provide a way for it to learn your selections by taking into account your song preference by your votes.
Benefits
Some benefits provided by streaming rather than storing music for later use are as follow. Aside from rendering storage limits irrelevant it is a free service so you get to listen to your favorite music cost free. It also provides a great way to discover new music artists similar to your favorites. A great way to “share” music, just tell your friends the name of the music artist and they can also create the same radio station.
Detractions
The main detraction of the service is not being able to play the song you want on demand though you can skip songs. This obstacle I seldom encounter, simply because when I want to listen to music I don’t care to setup a playlist of very specific songs and decide the order I want to listen to them. When I want to listen to music I know what song represents the type of music I want to listen to at the moment.
The other detraction just as important is of course the requirement of an internet connection and the difficulty of having it while mobile. The latter can be overcome by an unlimited data plan from a wireless carrier such as AT&T or Verizon. Not a detraction at all if you have an internet connected computer around when you want to listen to music.
Challenge
Though perfection is impossible I challenge you to try the two services. I’m partial to Pandora.com because of its simplicity, but last.fm provides more in the form of information and media of the singer. So I challenge you to think of your favorite song and input it into Pandora.com and listen to the first five songs it picks without skipping. You’ll be surprised at how accurately it picks the right songs for you.
