Interesting discussion, its not often you hear a leader say we planned for one type of funding and ended up with another. It would be interesting to hear more about how that affected their timelines, etc.
The other interesting comment was about 'musical DNA.' Product Metadata as mentioned in another post here. Its interesting to use musicians to determine the scheme. How did that work? Is there a review process to enable further refinements? How does interaction with listners affect the data? Lots of interesting directions this could take.
Meta data management is key to data management, at times it is difficult to get buy in on this construct from management executives! Their question is what data about data?
Alternative would be to have Pandora sponsor the event and then we can set up "radio broadcasts" along the running route! Hey this is a whole new marketing strategy for your business as well. Let me know I am a runner as well and a marketing maven if you will. Neal RDOST
Tim a little off the beaten track, would it be possible to touch base with you and see if a few of your performers would like to volunteer and provide music to the Air Force Marathon runners in Dayton Ohio on the third Saturday of September 2011.
Just like the least privileges model for access control, I am seeing companies try to handle data the same way. It used to be collect everything, then use what you need. Now, every application is being scrutinized to determine what data is really needed, then only collect that. It sounds like Pandora has a good grasp of that situation.
I am definitely interested in what's going on. I am an IT/Privacy guy for a healthcare entity. We're small...but committed. Love to share data/info/ideas with like minded.
We have found that a subscription-based model has been a tough road in education as well, and are beginning to consider an advertising model as well. Zip code is definitely an important attribute, but we are also collecting other demographic information as well so that we can hopefully better target advertising to the needs of our users.
Pandora database seems very complex database, where you have mentioned that this database have around 400 attributes of music files, which must be very big. Now, just wondering, which database is being used for this database?
I just got off listening to Tim's archive. The essence...data is key and aggregating and utilizing to meet business needs defines the success. Looks like Pandora are doing it better. Not sure how a song can have 400 attributes. I guess - it binds to user interaction behavior in order to have such number of attributes.
hounshop made an excellent point by saying "The problem is that some never know how to balance between good content and ad content." I even see bloggers fall for that and debase their content in order to attract more clicks, and, in turn -- or so they would hope -- more ad revenue.
The 'Value' of data collected, processed and stored is hard to justify or simply hard to find such a yardstick to relay it to either op-cost or captital cost.
This is a very interesting way to get this materila and I'm looking forward to the next 59 days. As a college student working on my degree BS ITS SEcurity.
@Mr. Roques: I understand your point, but the difficulties Pandora faces has more to do with the difficulty of actually getting the licenses they require. It's easier to get a U.S. license than a license abroad.
@abdlah: We are all aware that it is difficult for online companies to remain viable without ads. The problem is that some never know how to balance between good content and ad content. They put emphasis on ads than anything else.
I personally believe this is an amazing opportunity to share information about what we think are the world wide tendencies --Internet Trend Topics of the moment.
@Susan: I am curious if it may be possible/worthwhile for them to -- as a stop-gap measure -- work with several major individual labels to at least offer some select songs abroad, since there is no "central" force to work through internationally.
@Joe StanganelliThanks! I'm sorry I missed the live stream in order to be there for him replying to those questions. There are so many things that could go wrong that the same music studios are afraid of broadcasting their music abroad.
@hnicolassuero Tim commented about the matter in the chat, but I'm also a lawyer and have dealt with music law issues. There is an exception to U.S. copyright law when it comes to published music called a compulsory license. Plus, you have but a few major licensing giants in the U.S. (BMC, ASCAP., one or two others), so that makes it a lot easier for Pandora to operate.
Right now there are no licenses like the US one in other countries (ie. centralized, compulsory, affordable). So we're stuck in the US right now. It's wildly frustrating.
@Mr Roques, this is what Tim said about that a while ago: >>
Right now there are no licenses like the US one in other countries (ie. centralized, compulsory, affordable). So we're stuck in the US right now. It's wildly frustrating.
Mr.Roques: This is what you read on their website when you want to access from ouside the US:
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
In your store about including zip code in the set of data that you collect from the customer and base the marketing campaign on how do you qualify that decision: as Business decision or as Technological decision ?
Tim, you have said that there are about 400 attributes associated with a song which even includes strictly technical data related to a song like, key, tone etc. If I am a musician and know a bit about music, can I add to those attributes? like a wiki?
also, are there any plans for a pandora-studio type integration or production of media, a la the recent spate of HULU-exclusive webisodes, etc? I can't help but wonder if pandora/netflix type distribution could reasonably be used by the studios to shred costs and increase exposure in lieu of physical media distro.
can you talk a little bit about that fair pricing? "unlimited access" for a relatively affordable periodic cost is a model borne out by decades of health clubs; pay up front and monthly and use it or lose it. Metered pricing for access and bandwidth are two separate dimensions of cost, one for the digital asset management and the other for essentially infrastructure, but metered pricing is at odds with the common understanding of net neutrality.
Cost structure - it's all licensing! That's actually half-true. Bandwidth is getting very cheap, and in the long run the only other significant expense are sales-related. That's of course if we manage to hit true scale.
Thats good to here that Pandora has songs in different langauges (including Indian), which means it is really for music as they say Music has no boundaries.
flannery, what are the limitations on treating all media the same? I'd rather pay for access and infrastructure with a guarantee of accessibility and longevity than to spend my cash on local storage and backup capability; e.g. why should I build a RAID5 NAS on my home network when the full-fidelity media can be accessed at any time through Pandora, etc?
Hi Tim! Can you give a procentage split on the expences of one song downloaded by a customer? A) Royalty B) Bandwith C) Storage&Tech D)Labour E) Marketing
Right now there are no licenses like the US one in other countries (ie. centralized, compulsory, affordable). So we're stuck in the US right now. It's wildly frustrating.
Well, folks, it's been a real slice... I have to go, but I'll try the continuing saga this afternoon... I hope some of the kinks get worked out by then.... ;-)
My fifth attempt to post this question, so apologies if they all show up at once now:
Tim, given your observations on the difficulties of a subscription-based business, must the be-all and end-all be advertising (a standpoint Twitter recently resigned itself to), or is there another big thing around the corner?
lcdrtom: You think that's frustrating? Try refreshing the page and having to go slowly through an hour's worth of posts to get to the current point! What a horrible system.
Is free music access the future? Actually, it's been like that forever - radio. Radio accounts for 80% of all music listening - has done for decades, and continues to today.
Tim- you mentioned that, if not for a sort of grassroots political campaign, Pandora may not have survived. Can you go ito a bit more detail on what was done on this front? Do you think this is a good way for new struggling businesses to succeed?
I have no experience with Pandora. What is Pandora? Is it a playlist site like project playlist or are you able to purchase and download music like iTunes? or is it a combination of both?
Very disappointed with this opening session and not being able to hear, reading the frustrations of others in same place as me. Glad that some were able to make it work and are finding it interesting.
Biggest challenge for us keeping our revenue ahead of our royalty cost. It's like pushing a rock up a hill. We pay $.02/hour is licensing fees alone. So growth is a double-edged sword.
Re. YouTube - there's no doubt that anything 'on-demand" is cannibalistic of sales. So those forms of consumption need to be monetized. If you're a new artists, I'd be more focused on audience-building. I wouldn't be nearly as concerned about my sales. The currency of the future is a loyal fan. If free on-demand is what it takes to connect, the more the better.
Tim/flannery: How do you balance data collection with privacy, give the intrinsic imbalance of power between your firm and the individual users, in terms of how data can be used or abused?
Is there any way to easily explain what type of attributes are being attached to each song? Mathemagician explained dimensional analysis in brief. I am just curious how the songs are "scored"
Hi Tim. How does a network like yours handle security, if your end data needs to be as publicly available as it does, especially since the front end/back end integration is so tight?
@Susan...yes, I had to refresh to get my posts to show, and refreshing is taking several minutes. Perhaps this is because of the number of participants??? I haven't experienced these issues on the ieRadio shows previously.
Also, to be clear, the Q&A we'd planned with Tim is text only -- there's no audio associated with the Q&A. Was supposed to be a text chat here in messages like this.
math... that sounds amazing. Whatever Pandora is doing works great because it is totally amazing how closely the music matches. (It's almost like the songs are related :-))
I can't get audio to work on any of my PC's. I have Windows 7 64-bit with IE 8.0. Upgraded Flash Player to 10.1 and turned off Pop ups. My XP VM machine has IE7 and also running Firefox. No audio on any of them...
There are mathematical techniques avaliable under the heading of "dimensional analysis" and search strategies (starting with most important attribute and then progressing down to lesser attributes with a scoring metric)...
While it is a high-dimensional space to match, you don't have to do it all at once. You can start with a few and whittle it down quickly...of course, the magic is in which ones you start with...;-)
rrmIE, I dunno, I was thinking it had something to do with "...putting them in a round office and telling them to do something in the corner..."... <grin>
math... i was wondering the same thing. How many ways can you match 2 songs with 400 + fields in play? I know that if I am listening to a channel, it is amazing how much the songs match!!! Kudos to the Pandora crew.
With 400+ dimensions of data for each song, is there any automated or AI-based process being developed for handling new songs and growing the song database?
Ok, all new ventures have growing pains and I would expect that day one would have some technical challenges but I am really disappointed with the content.That was it???
I have also signed up for the first class.Am still hopeful it will be useful.
Technical issues ….
Can’t turn off the cow bell
Can’t go out to other areas of the site while listening, always goes back to start of audio.
Could not find the Q&A session after the main lecture.
Thanks to Pandora for introducing me to other groups and music similar to what I already like! The music DNA is awesome idea - science and technology meet again.
Looking at the comments being posted this effort is pretty much a failure. Before any more of these sessions are done some serious testing is needed or the whole concept will become meaningless..
I refreshed, closed out & re-logged in, I closed out & emptied browser cache no audio, just this. Now I don't even have cow-bells. I think that this is a rediculous waste of my time at this point. Is the welcome address over?
oh ok, because i am on safari and was on firefox a moment ago, and both worked fine. It seems there are some kinks but I think they are going to be working them out since this is the kickoff
I ran into what appeared to be capacity issues when attempting to connect to the presentation. Once I got through, it ran fine, but it took a long time to get through.
I'm wondering if Tim is joining the message board, or if there is some other forum he is on; does anyone know what is supposed to be happening with that?
Nothing!!!!! So much for the Internet Revolution. Perhaps you should have had us all test before you started. Or at least advised us of the minimum requirements.
Working on it, BobDob. Sorry about the plunk. Yes the lecture started. If you can't hear it, please try refreshing and/or hitting pause/play on the player.
I am posting via firefox on my pc. I can see the updated chats on my ipad, just can't contribute from there. Sad about that, but I presume it may be due to the limitations of safari on ipad? Nonetheless, excited about the opening salvo from Mr. Westergren
Thats a good question in general. I know I have to be out for most of the 3 o'clock classes and was wondering if thre is a way to tune in beyond the live broadcast.
Will the Invocation address and welcome be available to be viewed at a later time? I have a commitment during lunch today and will not be able to attend.
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