i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Alex bookmarked this link to the New York Times Magazine story about Pandora earlier today, and I hope I'm not stepping on any toes by reposting it here, because I think there are a bunch of pretty fascinating 202-ish issues contained within that I'd love to discuss. Specifically, Pandora stood out to me after our "wisdom of crowds" discussion as a service that basically rejects the crowd and goes with recommendations derived from the basic components of music as broken down by experts.

There's something like a controlled vocabulary going on behind the scenes at Pandora, with experts (many of them musicians) assigning precisely defined musical concepts to the service's catalog of songs. The idea actually strikes me as a content vs. presentation issue — or, at least, a content vs. context one. Per the article: "More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it."

But the doubters wonder whether an algorithm based on musical facts alone actually accounts for all that goes into listening to music. Again, to the article: 

The problem with a computer reading waveforms is that it “has no common sense,” summarizes Mike McCready, a founder of a company called Music Xray, a digital-music business for entertainment companies and artists. “It doesn’t take into consideration whether the artist is just starting out or they’re at the pinnacle of their career, it doesn’t take into consideration what they wore to the Grammys or who they’re dating or what they look like or what their age is. You have to factor all of this stuff in.”

Well, do you? If you use Pandora — vs. other, more social music sharing systems — which do you think is better at predicting what you want to listen to? And if you're a Pandora user, would you be interested to see social recommendations from other Pandora users popping up alongside their expert picks, or is that somehow antithetical to the whole Pandora experience?