Pandora's 'Music Genome Project'

Report

Spring 2025

The data is collected by listening to songs and assigning data to 450 musical attributes/variables. I imagine much of this data is split between individual songs, artists, albums, and quite possibly, user feedback and listening habits.

This data is used to deliver music catered to the individuals perceived music tastes

Selected Artist’s Radio: Shinedown

Songs Played: A Symptom of Being Human – Shinedown
The Diary of Jane – Breaking Benjamin
Broken – Seether
Under Your Scars - Godsmack
How Did You Love? - Shinedown

These songs, like much of the artist’s music, are in the Rock genre, specifically slower in tempo with deep themes, and sometimes the occasional heavier and faster song.

Pandora appears to take aggregate data from all the artist’s songs into consideration, then selecting songs from the given artist, as well as similar songs from additional artists. It is clear from this selection that Pandora takes data like the songs’ tempo, genre, and even themes into consideration. The Music Genome Project likely defines key terms across various fields when given a base model (in this case, an artist/band name), and queries the database using those terms as parameters, selecting songs within a given margin of similarity.

I like all the songs selected for me, the very last one being one of my top 5 favorite songs across all genres.

I would absolutely put these five songs in a playlist together.