Digital Trends

Who'd have guessed? Turns out Pandora, that service which finds music you're (ahem) likely to like, dominates Internet listening on Slim Devices' Squeezebox.

Here's a slightly unusual one for you: music fans out there might recall the Music Genome Project, which was an ambitious effort to create a music recommendation service based on users' listening preferences. The idea is simple: users would listen to music, then give it a rating. As the system accumulated ratings from a user—and compared those ratings with other user's preferences—it would get better and better at recommending music the listener would enjoy. Except the system didn't depend on marketing-related information like music from the same artists, producers, albums, and genre (or whoever has material launching this week). Instead the system relies on intangible traits actually assigned to selections on a track by track basis: beat, mood, instrumentation, production, production, genre, attitude, rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic qualities, and many more.

Pandora grew out of the Music Genome Project, launching in August 2005 to provide commercial-free personalized music streams to listeners based on their music preferences. And here comes an interesting release from Slim Devices, saying that Pandora is the dominant streaming Internet music service used with its Squeezebox network music players, accounting for more than 50 percent of the streaming music hours used on the players.

The release also highlights some interesting usage numbers: since the Squeezebox provides a simple way for users to connect their home stereos to the Internet, listening has shifted away from a peak around noon (local time) towards evenings and weekends as users access their Pandora streams outside the workplace.

What I find personally interesting about this is that Pandora is certainly not the only music streaming service Squeezebox users can access: the system can also hook into RealNetworks' Rhapsody subscripton service, and Internet radio streams from Live365, radioio, and SHOUTcast, and users can stream/placeshift their own music collections. Yet Pandora dominates Squeezebox use, without offering content from major music distributors. Several factors probably contribute to Pandora's popularity, including being free of both fees and commercials. But perhaps users actually think Pandora does a good job of selecting music they enjoy—and that's an intriguing notion.