“The Song Decoders,” a very intriguing article by Rob Walker in the New York Times (with some smart reactions based on personal experience listed on his Murketing blog, including William Weir and Steve Sailer), looks at Pandora via an interview with founder Tim Westergren.

One question the article raises is how Pandora, with a “puny” library of only 700,000 songs, competes with services like Slacker and Spotify. I think the answer is Pandora’s powerful recommendation system: the subject of the article and a more appealing offer (at least for many listeners, in many contexts) than additional songs, in order to make sense of those very large libraries we now have access to.

Movies are moving in the same direction, as Chris Albrecht pointed out in a very interesting piece in last week’s NewTeeVee. Chris poses the question: between Amazon, Blockbuster, CinemaNow, and others, how do you choose which VOD service to use? As I commented, we think that people will use an outside service to select what they feel like watching from the world of movie options, then opt for a VOD service based on price and quality. Other comments echoed the “polygamous” approach to choosing a service.

“The Song Decoders” mentions what we hide as an example of the social influence on cultural consumption: “Last.fm, for example, publishes a chart listing the songs that its users most frequently delete from their public listening-stream data. The guilty pleasure Top 10 is dominated by the most radio-ready pop artists — Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” several tracks by Lady Gaga.” Actually this seems like an illustration of the opposite: the limits of social influence, since people enjoy some music despite explicit social pressure not to do so. Either way it’s quite a fascinating phenomenon and I wonder if we’ll see a similar one with movies and shows on Jinni in future.

Technorati Tags: Pandora, music genome, movie genome

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