Music
Internet Tastemaker Tim Westergren
If a friend, magazine or blog can recommend new music based on an implied understanding of your particular sonic palate, who’s to say a computer couldn’t do it better? Certainly not sonic gene splicer and Internet music pathfinder Tim Westergren, who came to Music City this week to discuss his attempts to trailblaze what might be called artificial taste.
A former musician and film composer, Westergren is the mastermind behind Pandora, a user-directed Internet radio station that rivals You Tube as a workspace attention-suck. If there’s such a thing as the science of musical taste, Pandora attempts to predict it. Its nerve center is the Music Genome Project, an expanding database of over 10,000 artists. Every workday, a staff of 35 “music analysts” in Oakland, Calif., combs through them, pinpointing musical genes—the DNA of songs, as measured across some 400 variables such as rhythm, harmony or arrangement. By keying a song or artist into Pandora, a user is matched with a random selection of songs that are musically similar.
“It sparks a lot of debate,” said Westergren, who stopped in Nashville on a cross-country tour promoting the site and gathering local music, “but the response has been outrageously positive.”
The results are often surprising. Say you like a hot new overhyped band such as Arctic Monkeys, and would like to hear other acts that sound the same. Pandora might respond, “We’ll play a song that exemplifies the musical style of Arctic Monkeys, which features hard rock roots, punk influences, a subtle use of paired vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation and mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation.”
Sounds good: I get two songs by Arctic Monkeys and a music lesson. But trouble comes with the next song that comes up: “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong,” by the Spin Doctors. No matter how technically similar the song is to Arctic Monkeys, little miss Pandora is wrong—on the spectrum of cool, Spin Doctors are about as far from Arctic Monkeys as an artist can get. That’s a common complaint lodged by Pandora users—that the results are often too mainstream, or even downright cheesy.
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For fans of musical discovery, though, the likelihood of finding a band you didn’t know you liked or didn’t know existed is a large part of the appeal. Musical missteps aside, it can be refreshing to find new music without sorting through a chorus of value judgments usually assigned by friends and critics, and Westergren likes it that way.
“We don’t know what’s cool or not, and we don’t care,” says Westergren, whose Nashville stop took him to Grimey’s, The Bluebird Café, MTSU’s Recording Industry department and other Nashville musical hotspots like the Ryman and the Exit/In. He says his goal is to aid in musical discovery by making music more accessible to the masses. In every city on the tour, there’s a designated meeting place for anyone who visits Pandora to show up and talk about music or give feedback on the site.
Perhaps more encouragingly, Pandora doesn’t distinguish between signed and unsigned bands. Anyone can send in a CD to be added to the database. Nashville bands The Features and De Novo Dahl have turned up in some user results on Pandora. “There’s no prerequisite for what gets added,” Westergren explained. “They don’t have to be signed or even have CD artwork. Our only criterion is that it’s good music.”
In this context, “good” means that the staff of analysts simply agrees that it should be included. Eventually, Pandora intends to add features beyond song or artist searches, so that users can search for sad country songs or share their stations with other users. “We’re not playing A&R,” Westergren says. “We’re helping bands find their audience.”
And if you don’t like something that turns up on Pandora, you can simply veto it and it will never appear on your playlist again. It’s a way of refining and shaping the station so that it becomes your version of the Arctic Monkeys sound—or in my case, the version that bypasses Spin Doctors for Superchunk.