Pandora: From near-death to profitability in a year
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
In case anyone working with/at Pandora is reading this: you guys are awesome. I've gotten more new music from you than anywhere else. I noticed you seem to have changed your algorithm lately (At least, in the past few weeks I've suddenly gotten a LOT of new music) and I like it a lot.
Except in other countries than the United States, United Kingdom and Germany.
I have to admit that listening to last.fm is a completely different experience. There are a much deeper selection of tracks and I was thrilled to hear a 24 minute DJ Shadow song.
I wish pandora the best, and I was ok with the occasional video ad. But every time I change a station? If it was every 3rd time I might have put up with it.
My main complaint with Last.FM is that it makes me putting a label on what I like in music, and then match that up with how other people label music. I know next to nothing about music, I just know I like certain songs and dislike others (Ok, I know a little more than that, but not much). When I used Last.FM I would pick a genre/tag I liked/artist, listen for a while, and get bored with it because it either sounded exactly the same or else I picked the wrong tag and it turns out that wasn't the factor in the original music I liked.
Also, I use Fire.fm firefox last.fm toolbar which is great as it puts play controls right into firefox and last.fm does not need to be open!
Its amazing how much more highly I think of them for basically just throwing out hats.
If I ever open a restaurant I am going to randomly dispense free appetizers and desserts. If I ever run a (freemium) startup, I am going to randomly give away free accounts. Not to everyone, not so much that it hurts the bottom line, but enough that the buzz and goodwill generated outweighs whatever loss I'm taking.
Chris from Grooveshark.
Huge fan of your service, great way to get a hold of obscure music fast. Haven't built out my playlists yet though
Finally tracked down a song I've been looking for since I stopped using my old creative zen player: http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Sasha_s_Voyage_Of_Ima/1...
I do have one suggestion for you though: autoplay is a great feature, but it took me a long time to realize the button was even there. If there's a way to make it more prominent I think that would help.
Thanks for your suggestion about Autoplay. This will be fixed in our upcoming product launch. If you want a sneak peak, check out preview.grooveshark.com.
Thanks.
PS: If you'd be willing to toss a shirt up north of the border, I'm a medium.
I'll be happy to toss up a shirt up North (my e-mail is in my profile). We get them made by American Apparel and they are quite comfy. I've been wearing mine all week and I think my co-workers are starting to demand a change.
I like the fair use policy on the copyrights page a lot.
Are you really going to be able to let users drive to the exact song they want to hear, even after critical mass builds up? Seems too good to be true. I always assumed that was how Pandora managed to keep the heat off (by not letting users pick the exact song when they want to hear it).
To answer your question, yes, we will always have a search-and-discover interface because that is where our real value comes from.
As far as critical mass is concerned, we are doubling about every 2-3 months with absolutely no marketing or PR (which is why you don't hear about us on TechCrunch very often). We've got a lot of work ahead of us in terms of scaling to meet demand, but so far we're handling it well.
Bonus points for having a song that my $15/mo subscription service doesn't!
I never expected a response at all, let alone that night.
It really says something about how good you are doing if people will go out of their way to make sure you get paid.
Their autoplay feature is a little bit less refined than Pandoras, but I actually like that, since with Pandora I ended up listening to the same 30-40 songs over and over again, since it kept reccomending the same songs.
Chris from Grooveshark
Short term it works fine, but long term(couple of days) it'll go off on a tangent. For example, I'd start out with a fast paced upbeat song, and eventually it'll go to playing non-stop slow country music.
For new discovery, I think you should let the user be able to select a new song style mid-way through. Something like "Play more like it" button, that would reset the algorhytm around the current song you are listening to.
i.e. you start out with Hip Hop, then eventually you'll hit a song that is Hip Hop/Country, then you'll hit a song that's Country/Country, and then you are stuck listening for 3 hours to country music. Until you hit Country/Hip-Hop and get out of the loop.
You could probably expand the options a little bit by making a few mutually exclusive lists. For example someone whose initial search was a country music song, probably doesn't want to ever hear gangsta rap. And vice versa.
As far as trying to figure out the mood, I don't think that's plausible. The whole like/dislike/forward thing isn't going to get you the results you want. For example, I might "like" a song, but it doesn't mean I want to start hearing more songs like that at the moment. The dislike/forward is mostly used to skip past the songs that don't fit my initial criteria.
I think it's something that you are better off leaving for your users to do manually. If they want to start hearing new types of music, they'll just search for a new song. There is no real reason to try to guesstimate their mood, since chances are you'll just get it wrong and will ruin the user experience.
Oh and here is another suggestion for auto-play, let users use it without searching for the initial song. Use it as a "Play me a random song" button. This way users can discover new music.
Keep up the good work.
You're very casually making a serious accusation. Can you offer any evidence that Grooveshark is doing something illegal?
If you get an agreement with the major labels, I will become a paid subscriber. It would be one of the greatest things that have happened to music in this millennium.
As for the major labels, keep your eyes peeled. We're working hard on that end. We know it will be a critical component.
Although I don't entirely understand the last line of the article "Pandora will be a textbook case for why execution matters more than vision in tech"
I get that they've worked their asses off to make it a reality, I think the vision of smart music recommendation and discovery is what drove the execution. ??