I’m old enough to remember when Pandora was the Music Genome Project. How far we’ve come, or fallen.
After the passage of the CCPA, Pandora would better align with the spirit of the law by not only allowing users to opt-out of cookies that allow corporations to monetize their data, but also to allow them to independently review and learn from the data they generate.
Like the music genome project of old, which told you what songs had in common (often through countless hours of human labor), it would be nice to have a tab in your account with sophisticated user analytics. I’m not asking to peek behind the green curtain of proprietary analytics related to business operations, I just want to know what my inputs and choices tell me about my music preferences. I’d like to get intelligent (dare I say, artificially intelligent), recommendations along the lines of a music educator.
If Pandora treated the relationship between user and brand a bit more respectfully, the end of year Spotify Wrapped embarrassment would be avoided. But my ideal is not just something superficial like a predigested 9x16 image, but a deeper commitment to the original spirit of this project. We have great potential to grow as listeners, and if you paired intelligence with audio fidelity, Pandora could be the streaming service of choice for old heads like me.
Return to your roots Pandora. Appreciate many hours of great music thus far.
