New Ways Music is Being Heard: Pandora Radio and MySpace Music

According to Forrester Research, Inc, an independent technology and market research company, half of all music sold in the US will be digital in 2011 and sales of digitally downloaded music will surpass physical CD sales in 2012. With a vastly changing industry, consumers are finding new mediums to use to listen to their favorite tunes. A decade ago, we would have all gone to our local Best Buy or Circuit City each Tuesday to pick up the latest and greatest in music via purchasing the physical CD. Today, we are purchasing the same music via our computers, and transferring it to portable hard drives, or MP3 players. While a little more advanced and interactive than your traditional FM radio station, Pandora’s one-of-a-kind internet service and MySpace Transmissions are making displacing waves within the industry.

The Human Genome Project was a scientific breakthrough that worked to identify all of the approximate 20,000-25,000 genes within human DNA. From this, scientists hoped to identify certain genes and their expression qualities. Pandora, shown by a screenshot to the left, essentially accomplished the same thing with music back in 2000. As described on Pandora’s website, “A group of musicians…set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level… by assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song.” These dedicated listeners focused on every part of the song ranging from the melody, to instrumentation, orchestration, along with many others. Pandora emphasizes that its not about what the band looks like or genre they are put in by somebody else’s standards, its about the actual sound of the music you are listening to. With this new technology listeners can create a free account, accessible from any computer, which stores customizable, specific “stations” to each listener’s personal taste. For instance, by creating a Norah Jones Station, listeners are now streamed endless music that has similar “musical genomic makeup” playing artists such as Dave Matthew’s Band, Alanis Morrisette, and smaller, lesser known artist, Corinne Bailey Rae. Not only are listeners introduced to a variety of music, but the artist name, song title, and album name are displayed as well. I have found Pandora to have replaced the FM radio technology within my home that I traditionally used, but I am also able to use Pandora via my Blackberry. It is just as free as FM radio, without any commercials or annoying disc jockeys, and best of all, it has an endless catalogue extending past your repetitive weekly Top 20.

In addition to the revolutionary Music Genome Project, another popular online destination, MySpace.com, has been making waves within the industry regarding the way music is being heard and seen by consumers. Globally popular social networking giant, MySpace.com announced the launch of “MySpace Transmissions, a program [designed to] empower top recording artists with a new platform to create and distribute exclusive video content available for viral distribution and audio tracks available for purchase in the U.S.” Essentially, the millions of MySpace community members are now able to appreciate a band or artist differently by having pay-per-view access to behind the scenes in recording studio sessions or exclusive video Q&A’s with the artist. Already becoming one of the dominant communication mediums of today’s youth, MySpace has now created an intimacy level that was non-existent before.

I am greatly moved when introduced to the chemistry of a band, their life stories, and other intimate facets of artists that may not otherwise be available via compact disc or just listening to their music elsewhere. The band pictured to the right, Sublime, released a video/DVD called, “Stories, Lies, Tales & Exaggerations” which is a documentary comprised of hours of home footage and personal testimonials from each of the band members describing their strife and struggles as well as their career development. This new found personal intimacy created a lifelong Sublime fan out of me and has given me a greater understanding and appreciation for their music. This is what MySpace Transmissions is attempting to capture from their enormous, online community. In fact, recording artist James Blunt, who was one of the first artists to be featured by MySpace Transmissions said, “[It] allows me the great opportunity to connect directly with my fans. Playing my new songs with the guys in the band and having fans able to hear them in a new and unique way is always what I am looking for. I am excited to be the first to launch this with MySpace.” All and all, Transmissions represents a new medium for music to be seen and heard, but above all, it is using “Unique music programming [combined with] new business models that benefit labels, bands, and fans.”

Only a mere seven years ago, the revolutionary iPod was introduced from Apple which changed the way we all will store and listen to our music forever. Within those seven years however, musical mediums such as Pandora and MySpace Transmissions have surfaced and opened up the industry’s ears allowing us to hear and see our favorite artists, past and present a little differently. As an avid musical enthusiast, I am getting chills down my back writing this looking forward to the next seven years to come and the exciting technologies that will emerge.