A few years ago, Steve Sailer tried out Pandora, the “Music Genome Project” for Internet radio — which does not recommend songs based on shared tastes but rather relies on experts’ assessments of songs across 250 factors — and found that it worked pretty well:
But one response was off: I put in Revolution Rock by the Clash, which isn’t a rock song at all, but a lazy, joyous reggae ramble. Pandora came back with the punk Career Opportunities by the Clash, which suggests that one of their employees had cut corners and categorized Revolution Rock by title rather than by music.
Anyway, a recent New York Times Magazine piece shares this anecdote:
[Pandora CEO Paul Westergren] likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’ ”This anecdote almost always gets a laugh. “Pandora,” he pointed out, “doesn’t understand why that’s funny.”
A basic problem that you can’t get around in Pandora:
If you like a song not so much because of the style but because it’s an expert execution of a style, then Pandora isn’t as good as a recommendation site.
Pandora performs a sort of factor analysis on your musical tastes, Sailer notes — although he layers quite a bit of his own “insight” on top of it:
Listening to these songs that I picked out a few years ago plus other ones similar to them, I would say I have post-British Empire upper middle class public schoolboy tastes in music. This may seem odd, but my tastes in songs would seem most natural for a Scottish or northern English lad at a southern English boarding school for toffs, or maybe at Sandhurst, the military academy.
[...]
Very strange, but it also fits a lot of my taste in authors as well (Waugh, Orwell, Wodehouse, etc.). I now remember how much I liked David Niven’s autobiography, who was a Sandhurst grad. And the autobiography of Churchill, another public schoolboy/Sandhurst man.So, it’s no surprise that The Clash were always my favorites. After all, Joe Strummer, despite his appalling teeth, was an upper middle class public schoolboy whose dad, a friend of Kim Philby’s, was a diplomat (i.e., spy) for the fading British Empire.
You could use Pandora’s database for scholarly purposes, he suggests:
For example, T.S. Eliot pointed out that an artist creates his own “school” of predecessors that nobody noticed had anything in common before. For example, I’ve always felt that the ancestors of the punk rock of 1976 included from the 1968 to 1973 era: Communication Breakdown by Led Zeppelin, Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting by Elton John, three songs that sounded like they have more in common after you’d heard the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Clash than before. This giant proprietary database would presumably allow those kind of academic hypotheses to be tested objectively.