I had a chance to meet Tom Conrad from Pandora last week at the dinner after Blog Business Summit, and then again at Bar Camp. Pandora’s service basically allows you to generate a personal set of “stations” based on a favorite song or artist – their backend does the rest!
Now, hear me as I speak with the authority that only a miserly cheap bastard can muster: this is actually something I would pay for.
Like any self-respecting music aficionado, I have a pretty big collection of music. But that amount of music has an unfortunate side effect – the more music you have, the less you actually listen to new music. Pandora solves this, feeding you a constant stream of only the good stuff. I’ve been listening to it the last three evenings, and it’s been a “set and forget” experience. Wow.
The part that’s really interesting about this service is that it’s a big of a legal hack – because of the way webcasting royalties work it costs Pandora almost nothing to provide the music itself (the cost is really in the bandwidth and the tech to provide accurate recommendations). The service, currently in invitation-only “preview”, is expected to be in the “couple bucks a month” price range. Totally acceptable.
The one thing I would like to see Pandora do with its technology is extend it to the music I already own. Why? Well, because of the aforementioned webcasting hack, there are certain restrictions on what Pandora can offer. It can’t, for example, just serve you the exact song you want – music on demand is verboten (which makes sense, given that webcasting rules are meant to be analogous to the rules for radio). Also, when streaming music to your machine, you can’t see what song is next, or play the previous song. A bit annoying. But imagine if you could had a Pandora plugin for iTunes that allowed you to autocreate playlists of stuff you owned that were similar/matched. You do this yourself currently, but what if Pandora could do it for you, and allow you to effectively take their service with you? Imagine how much music you currently own that you don’t listen to, simply because you inevitably end up playing the same stuff again and again.
Bottom line: Pandora is awesome – check it out. Uh, I mean, check it out when there’s a public beta. If you’re interested in additional details about Pandora, you might also want to check out this review at TechCrunch.