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The Pandora Team

Recent Articles

Analyst Spotlight: Meet Darian Gray – Rapper, Drummer, Pianist & Pandora Music Analyst

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Music analysis is the backbone of Pandora’s recommendation engine, the Music Genome Project, which is the magical force that gives our millions of listeners radio stations that are personalized to their individual tastes. Our music analysts are essential to this process, working day-in and day-out to listen to and meticulously analyze every new song that is added to our catalog.

Screen Shot 2013-02-27 at 5.26.15 PM.pngToday, we are profiling Pandora veteran Darian Gray, who joined the company in 2006 shortly after the service launched on the web.

Darian analyzes songs for Pandora in several of our Genomes, including R&B, reggae, pop, gospel and hip-hop. These genres also match perfectly with his musical career outside of Pandora. As a professional drummer, piano player and rapper, Darian is almost always playing music, whether he is on tour with San Francisco-native Martin Luther, playing drums for R&B classic Booker T. Jones or rapping in his band Dynamic.

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Analyst Spotlight: Meet Michelle Alexander, Pandora’s Eclectic Musical Mind

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For this month’s Analyst Spotlight, we spoke to one of the “originals”: Senior Analyst Michelle Alexander, who has been listening and analyzing music at Pandora since 2000 when the Music Genome Project was first getting started. She’s fluent in nearly all the genomes Pandora has created, which are categorized by genre, with her specialties being Pop and Classical.

MichelleAlexander.JPGA singer and keyboardist who performs under the name LikeLove, Michelle’s music background began with a vigorous classical training in piano and composition, followed by jazz studies at the New England Conservatory. She then jumped into the indie rock world playing keyboards for Smog. One of the many bands she’s played with recently was a 12-piece experimental jazz ensemble called Kaijuscope. But the accomplishment she’s most proud of right now is her new EP, ‘Talking To Everyone.’, which was released earlier this year. …
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Analyst Spotlight: Meet Danny Eisenberg, the Music Analyst Who Analyzed Pandora’s 1 Millionth Track

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A fun fact that not every Pandora fan might know is that every song on Pandora is listened to and analyzed by an actual human being. We have a department of some 25 Musical Analysts whose job it is to continually enrich and expand Pandora’s catalog of music and comedy. These individuals, all of whom are trained and accomplished musicians themselves, manually analyze each track across up to 450 individual musical attributes.

These attributes cover every detail of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, instrumentation, and vocal performance – representing the musical “DNA” of a track and creating the fundamental data set that drives the Music Genome Project. The process can take anywhere from 15 minutes for a simple 3-minute pop song, to over an hour for a symphonic piece. We think these talented Music Analysts deserve a little extra Pandora love, so we are starting a new blog series to spotlight them on a monthly basis.

DannyE.JPGThe first Analyst Spotlight is an eight-year Pandora veteran who recently analyzed Pandora’s 1 millionth song, a track called “If We Live” by Walk The Sun, which appears on the “Occupy This Album”. With his musical expertise in piano and organ, Bay Area-native Danny Eisenberg has toured internationally and contributed to several bands over the years, including The Mother Hips, Counting Crows, Shelby Lynne, Penelope Houston, Tift Merritt, Jonathan Richman, and Girls. When asked about analyzing the 1 millionth song Danny said, “It’s a fun thing to say, but honestly we all analyze a lot of songs here. It was just the luck of the draw.”

As you can imagine, Danny is full of interesting stories. Here are a few tidbits from our conversation with him last week: …
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