Today’s note is another about my favorite service recently. Any guesses? Yes, another “more about Pandora” post is coming.
Some time ago Pandora invited something they call Backstage. It’s a service covering different information about artist: biography, discography, some photos and links to similar artists. Nothing extraordinary – allmusic has it all and much more and provide its service for more than 10 years already. Starting Backstage is a wild-goose chase then, isn’t it? I don’t think so.
• A way that Pandora works (as a radio station with partially random content) means that a user will hear new artists and new songs. I’ve personally heard lots of artists I’d never even knew they’d existed before. This means users will probably want to know more about singers and bands. The easiest and the quickest way is now using Backstage.
• Possibility of adjusting content Pandora plays means that statistically you’ll hear more music you like. Assuming that you’d check out only artists whose music you like – the chance for using backstage is increased.
• Pandora has information about similar artist – hey, that’s one of their key features used already in their main functionality. A similar artist section was always a killer feature for me in music services. If you want to find something new, you probably search for something generally similar to other things you like, yet a bit different and still unknown for you. In a case of music – you just go to the similar artist section on your favorite band.
• They have additional information from user feedback. This is probably the most valuable information they collect. I believe Pandora already could tell me, that if I hear (on one of my stations) Sirsy, Mirah and Vaya con Dios I should like another artist because other users with similar taste to mine liked her. That’s something allmusic doesn’t have.
OK, there are some reasons for Pandora to have something like Backstage service. Why not to integrate with e.g. allmusic? Wouldn’t that be a perfect marriage? I don’t think so.
• Pandora has its own base of similarities and allmusic has another. How to synchronize them?
• Most of information Pandora needs to run Backstage (basic artist data, discography, similarities matrix) is in their database. They just needed to add some biography information and develop simple GUI to allow users to access the data.
• If Pandora wanted to integrate with allmusic they’d face typical integration issues (different ids, two-way synchronization). If really there’s a necessity to integrate with another service?
• Pandora has own great potential which can give added value to Backstage – user feedback (users’ “likes” and “don’t likes”) and whole original audio content, not only 30-second fragments. After outsourcing Backstage to another service (like allmusic) it would be very hard to exploit this potential.
In this case adding a new service to an existing one was wise choice. Integration wouldn’t be a simple task (it never is). I can’t be sure but making Backstage by Pandora crew probably took less time than the integration would. And last but not least – Pandora keeps everything under control so I expect a bunch of unique features in future.
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