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To Curate Pandora's New Local Stations, Color From Social Media Is Key

This article is more than 8 years old.

Pandora, an early online music king, enjoys its spot as the world's largest Internet radio company. But, the service's reign is coming under assault as it faces pressure from newer music-streaming rivals like Spotify and Apple Music, which offer users more control over exactly which songs they hear.

Pandora  is working to take a larger slice of traditional radio advertising budgets, but it has also been competing by tweaking its product. This summer, Pandora launched four new local genre stations, largely tailored to the specific tastes of a city or region. Algorithms and automation are key to all of Pandora's 800 curated genre stations and the experience of its nearly 80 million monthly active listeners. However, the stations also involve a considerable amount of human work. Pandora's recent launch of the local stations highlights curators'  role in station-building, and in particular, how insight from social media is an increasingly important human tool in delivering the right music to listeners.

In late July, Pandora officially launched four local genre stations: Two Latin stations -- a New York Latin station called  La Jevi, a Los Angeles station featuring regional Mexican music called La Pura Neta --- and two hip-hop stations, The Yay in the Bay Area and The ATL in Atlanta. The goal of the stations is to reflect the specific tastes of those geographic regions within the broader genres. While the stations do contain a number of local artists, they also include popular music created elsewhere. Pandora chose the Bay Area, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles because they tend to shape music trends nationally for their respective genres. Hip-hop and Latin are also highly popular among Pandora listeners as a whole, the company said.

To create the stations, Pandora selected two curators with extensive backgrounds in the genres. Justin Boland, a hip-hop DJ and producer who grew up in the Bay Area, curated the hip-hop stations. And Marcos Juarez, who worked as a DJ with a focus on Latin music and spent years studying the Mexican folk style Son Jarocho, curated the Latin stations. On the machine-learning side, Pandora scales the work of about 30 human analysts and 15 curators. Pandora also leverages the company’s “music genome project,” which includes music specialists' analysis of about 57 years worth of music. The music genome continues to expand and learn which songs users “thumb up” and “thumb down” to better guess what they like. But social media can give Pandora curators a more nuanced understanding of listeners' tastes and help them discover new trends and artists.

“Pandora is often presented in the public as being this kind of robotic, algorithmic thing that is void of any human aspect,” Juarez said. “We want to be personalized radio for everyone, and you need to have a human component to guide you.”

Pandora began testing the stations in May and regularly tweaks them based on listener feedback and insight from the curators, who continually scout for new artists and sounds. Like other Pandora stations, the local stations are a malleable music guide as opposed to a set playlist. In an ideal world, Boland said, the stations are “the perfect library for listeners.”

Streaming Competition

The local genre stations are part of a recent initiative by Pandora to package music for listeners based on geography. Pandora experimented with a handful of local stations over the past few years. It previously made three stations based on listeners’ tastes in Puerto Rico, one in late 2013 and two last year. The curators said they see local stations as a way to build a more personal connection between listeners and the service, which otherwise offers stations based on an artist, genre or song. New ways to please listeners can lead to longer listening sessions, more advertising revenue and more paid subscribers. And the more satisfied listeners are, the less likely they are to jump ship for a competitor.

“For us, it was about unearthing new ways to hear music,” Boland said. “We want to give people as many opportunities to hear what they want to hear. If we can organize it in a way that makes sense for you in a local area, we’re going to make you much happier as a listener.”

Pandora competes with a host of music streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon's Prime Music and a free ad-supported version of Google Play Music, which launched this summer and offers curated digital radio stations which users can create based on a mood, genre, album or song. Google’s service is powered in part by the search giant’s acquisition of streaming startup Songza about a year ago.

Pandora has about 3.9 million paying subscribers and 79.4 million active listeners. By comparison, Spotify has more than 20 million paying subscribers and about 75 million active users, and late last year, Google Play Music said it had 817,000 paying U.S. subscribers. Prime Music is available to members of Amazon's $99-per-year Prime membership, which analysts speculate includes between 50 to 70 million members worldwide.

Pandora’s active listeners have dropped by about two million people from 81.5 million at the end of last year, according to Pandora’s latest figures. Pandora shares were trading at $17.09 at the close on Tuesday, down nearly 37% from a year ago. However, the service's recent boost to its full-year revenue forecast to a range of $1.18 billion to $1.19 billion is positive. In the three months ending June 30, Pandora's revenue rose 30 percent from the same period a year earlier to $285.6 million; profit, excluding some items, was 5 cents per share, beating forecasts of 2 cents. Pandora said listener hours rose 5% in the same period.

“As a leader in the streaming music space, Pandora is relentlessly focused on extending that leadership position and making Pandora even better for our loyal following of listeners, who are listening longer and engaging more than ever before,” Pandora founder Tim Westergren said in an email. “Our competitors’ investment in this category simply reinforces our long-held belief that there is healthy consumer demand for digital music services.”

Station Curation

Some of the main quantitative resources Boland and Juarez use to shape the stations include users’ zip codes and data on which stations listeners create and which songs they they thumb up or down. The curators also consider local and international radio and sales charts and regions’ demographics.

But one tool that is becoming increasingly valuable to the curators is more nuanced: social media as a window into how genres are evolving as well as how listeners and artists relate to music. Boland and Juarez said social media posts by listeners and artists give them important information that data can’t.

“Social is the quickest and most insightful way to see how people are thinking,” Juarez said, noting that curators are constantly looking for ways to more deeply understand people’s attraction to music. “When you’re trying to get a regional flavor, you really don’t want to sound artificial. The focus is trying to be as representative as possible of what listeners want.”

Although the curators do sometimes discover emerging artists on social media, Boland and Juarez said they approach the sites first and foremost as a way to see larger patterns in listeners’ tastes and emerging styles. Repetition across social platforms helps the curators test findings from data, even though the language in posts is usually short and simple. Social posts also often indicate what makes certain artists and songs popular in different communities and helps reveal trends before they become big enough to show up in charts.

“We want to make sure that we’re on the cutting edge of music that’s out,” Boland said. “If a song isn’t doing well, we can look at both the Pandora data and what’s happening culturally or in the music scene to see what’s working and what’s not.”

The social networks Juarez and Boland look to most are Instagram, Twitter and Facebook , with Instagram often providing the most helpful color, they said. The curators described social media research as going down a rabbit hole and being open to what they find. They use each site differently. Instagram is a good place to find concert goers’ video clips of musicians’ shows, which can show how crowds react to specific artists and songs, even if the clips’ sound quality isn’t good.

“Instagram is very visual so that’s more to get texture and get a better sense of what people are doing in different places, what are people wearing, what are they drinking,” Juarez said.

Boland said if he doesn’t recognize a song in an Instagram clip, he’ll find it on Shazam, a music identification app. Sometimes this leads Boland to test out that artist or song on a Pandora station. Searching hashtags on Instagram or Twitter is another tool for finding lesser-known artists who share traits with artists who are already popular. The curators might, for example, search hashtags that contain phrases that appear frequently in a genre. Twitter is generally best for following breaking music industry news and for keeping tabs on what music blogs publish, the curators said. Juarez said social feeds can be especially helpful when artists make surprise or off-cycle releases.

Social feeds, for example, led Juarez to discover the Latin blog Remezcla.com, where he first learned about Kali Uchis, a Colombian-American soul singer, whose popularity has soared in the last year, well after she was featured on the blog. Boland also closely watches the social feeds of blogs, such as 2DopeBoyz, Noisey, Okayplayer, The Fader and Complex.

Artists’ profile pages on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter can be useful places to learn about what types of listeners follow an artist and what drives that artist’s fan base, whether that's albums, live shows or interaction with fans. The curators also pay attention to which musicians or songs the artists themselves like, comment on or mention in posts.

Beyond studying data and social media trends, the curators also make a point of experiencing music offline. This summer, for example, Juarez spent time in Cuba for Pandora, building relationships with artists and producers and hearing live bands.

“We represent the marriage of data and cultural capital,” Juarez said of Pandora’s curation process. “There’s only so much data can tell you.”

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