Community Blog - Page 19

A Day in the Life of a Music Analyst

An interview with Music Analyst Kevin Seal

Who are the Music Analysts at the core of the Music Genome Project, driving the best music recommendation system in the world on Pandora? We are a team of musicians who listen to songs and tag them with musicological, lyrical, genre, and mood data. Today I interviewed one of our Music Analysts, Kevin Seal, to get a sense of what a music analyst does in a day.

Ever since Pandora Stories launched in 2019, select verified artists like John Mayer, Maren Morris, Chris Isaak, and Lance Allen, as well as verified labels like Smithsonian Folkways, Sub Pop, Yep Roc and Hollywood Records, have all been using AMP’s Pandora Stories, to craft hosted playlists and mixtapes on Pandora.     

Today, we’re opening up these powerful curation tools so that all verified artist profiles in AMP will have access to Pandora Stories and the ability to curate playlists and mixtapes, with the option of adding a voice component to both listener formats – giving more meaning, heart, and insight into your fans' favorite music.

Over the last few years, we on the Music Analysis team here at Pandora have been immersed in a massive project revolving around the question of genre. We set out to identify, name and define all known musical genres - to the best of our ability - so we could then apply those genres to over a hundred thousand artists and millions of songs.

MGP2 - What’s Next for the Music Genome Project

Here at Pandora, we have recently completely redesigned the way we analyze music for the Music Genome Project, with a new system we call MGP2. We’ve developed a collection of new taxonomies that we use to describe songs, and a new, text-based tagging system that allows us to annotate music much more accurately and completely. This new way of annotating has improved all of our downstream systems and led to important improvements in the data science, machine learning, and content understanding that make our recommendation systems the best in the world. 

What is MGP2?