Seth Ford-Young is a professional bass player who performs up to five nights a week with local jazz and rock bands and occasionally lends his talents to recording sessions for artists like Tom Waits. But these days he has an unusual second gig.
As a senior music analyst at Pandora Media, he spends roughly 25 hours a week in an office suite here, listening to songs by artists like Sonny Boy Williamson and Memphis Slim and dicing them into data points. Is the singer's voice gravelly or silky? Is the scope of the song modest or epic? Does the electric guitar sound clean or distorted?
As he listens, Ford-Young fills out a scorecard on which he can rate hundreds of traits in each song on a five-point scale. Bit by bit, Pandora's music analysts have built a massive archive of data, cataloging the minute characteristics of more than 500,000 songs, from alt-country to bossa nova to metal to gospel, for what is known as the Music Genome Project.
At pandora.com visitors are invited to enter the name of their favorite artist or song and to get in return a stream of music with similar "DNA," in effect a private Internet radio station microtailored to each user's tastes. Since the service made its debut last November, more than 3 million people have signed up.
But they are tuning in to more than a musicologist's online toy: Services like Pandora have become the latest example of how technology is shaking up the hierarchy of tastemakers across popular culture. In music the shift began when file-sharing networks like the original Napster allowed fans to snatch up the songs they wanted, instantly and free.
The field is also full of new guideposts: blogs and review sites like hipster darling Pitchfork have gained influence without major corporate backing. And customizable Internet radio services like Pandora, Last.fm, Yahoo's Launchcast and RealNetworks' Rhapsody are pointing users to music far beyond the playlists that confine most radio broadcasts.
All told, consumers are increasingly turning away from the traditional gatekeepers and looking instead to one another -- to fellow fans, even those they've never met -- to guide their choices. Before long, wireless Internet connections will let them chatter not only on desktops, but in cars and coffee shops, too. And radio conglomerates and MTV, used to being the most influential voices around, are beginning to wonder how to keep themselves heard.
"The tools for programming are in the hands of consumers," said Courtney Holt, executive vice president for digital music at MTV Networks' Music and Logo Group, who formerly ran the new-media department for Interscope Records. "Right now it almost feels like a fanzine culture, but it's going to turn into mainstream culture."
If Pandora and other customizable services take off, they could shift the balance of power not just in how music is consumed, but in how it is made. "You now have music fans that are completely enabled as editorial voices," said Michael Nash, senior vice president for digital strategy and business development at Warner Music Group, one of the four major music conglomerates. "You can't fool those people. You can't put out an album with one good single on it. Those days are over."
The idea behind a recommendation engine is essentially to create an online version of a knowledgeable salesman, someone to help consumers navigate the dizzyingly vast digital marketplace. The most familiar form uses collaborative filtering, software that makes recommendations based on the buying patterns of like-minded consumers.
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