Pandora CEO Roger Lynch Wants To Create the Podcast Genome Project (variety.com) 19
Janko Roettgers, reporting for Variety: Pandora's new CEO Roger Lynch has big plans for podcasts: Lynch told Variety on the sidelines of CES in Las Vegas Thursday that he wants to create "the equivalent of the podcast genome project" as the company plans to add many more podcasts to its catalog. Lynch, who joined Pandora as president and CEO in September, said that the company is working on a deep integration of podcasts that will allow users of the service to easily browse and discover new shows. Describing these efforts as a kind of podcast genome project is a nod to Pandora's Music Genome Project -- a massive database of dozens of musical attributes for every single song in the company's music library that is being used to compile stations and aid discovery. Pandora is also looking to offer podcasters monetization options that will be superior to the current state of podcast advertising. Currently, many podcasters still rely on ads that they read themselves on air, Lynch said. "It is not the most effective advertising model."
Then By Golly (Score:1)
Let him!
Re: (Score:3)
I have a large music library ripped from CDs. Pandora is still a good way to discover new music even if it's not your primary listening tool. Whatever they use to make recommendations, it works - maybe not as good as Netflix's recommendation engine, but close. Just create a new station and seed it with a few of your favorites of a genre, and you can start sampling new music right away.
Yes, Pandora (Score:1)
That's the best/easiest way to approach the problem of listening to music, but what if you're trying to solve some other problem?
Suppose you wanted to automate suggestions to someone who doesn't have access to your files? Let's say you listen to Helloween all the time, but someone else listens to Gamma Ray all the time. Without using human brains how do you figure out that you and that other user are listening
Re: (Score:2)
Regardless, all this talk about Pandora is missing the biggest point-- their library is too damn small to do much of anything useful
Pandora is more like Netflix. It's useful to fill in a gap, but not big enough to be your sole provider. And the recommendation engine is there to find what they *do* have (much like Netflix).
Nope (Score:2)
If their podcast algorithm works anything like their music algorithm, I'll pass... it gets worse over time and eventually becomes intolerable.
Re: (Score:2)
only US (Score:2)
From http://www.pandora.com/restric... [pandora.com] " Pandora is only available in the U.S. right now – but we are working on bringing our music service to other parts of the world. "
They have this message since they started offering service.
Re: only US (Score:2)
It was available in quite a few countries for several years, but they pulled back to just US a couple of months ago
Better idea: (Score:1)
i object (Score:2)
to the usage of the term "genome" in this context
Ooh, the possibilities! (Score:2)
I've been thinking about this for quite a while. Breaking this into genres should be pretty easy, dividing between non-fiction ("documentary" podcasts, audio books, etc, as further classified like books), fiction (non-music "entertainment" pieces, as further classified like movies), and presumably "other" for oddities that can't be classified that way (the fourth group is "music," which they've already got a good handle on).
For music, Pandora currently pays musicians and other experts to manually go in a
Re: (Score:2)
They wouldn't need nearly that many ads if they're not paying for streaming rights. They can probably stream from the URL of the actual audio file and not have any bandwidth costs.
I'd wait and see - it might be worth it. Though I'm 4 months behind on the podcasts I have. I don't think I need to discover more.