Community Blog - Page 8

We are thrilled to present the first edition of the Pandora Community newsletter: The Listener Lounge

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?

What is the Music Genome Project?

 Inspired by the Human Genome Project of the 1990s and early 2000s, the Music Genome Project (MGP) was conceived by Pandora founder Tim Westergren to catalog the fundamental characteristics of the vast body of recorded music. The goal of this ambitious project was to allow music lovers to discover music based on inherent musical qualities, rather than sales data or industry-backed marketing.  The Music Genome Project provides a detailed analysis of millions of songs, describing features of harmony, rhythm, melody, vocals, instrumentation, lyrics, and more.  This data powers our best-in-class recommendation algorithms. Thanks to the rigorous and detailed music analysis of the Music Genome Project, none of our competitors can come close to the depth of our content understanding.