Boom!

Pandora + Tunecore = Discovery, Faster

A slightly edited version of an e-mail I sent to Pandora’s bizdev team yesterday.

UPDATE: I also forwarded the e-mail to Kevin Seal (Pandora exec. producer), and he replied with a nice, informative e-mail about their plans for the music submission process and their philosophy on curation and access.

Dear Pandora,

My name is Robbie Mitchell and I am co-founder of a production house & record label that creates educational rap music.  I’ve also been a Pandora listener since fall 2005.

A friend just used Twitter to announce her excitement about a new band she discovered on MySpace; I saw the tweet, googled the band, and listened to a couple songs.  It dawns on me that this is a comically inefficient way to discover music.  Similarly, earlier tonight a producer and I read a music review at All Music and wondered aloud about the value of a critical review.  Why do we need sites like All Music and Pitchfork to make critical suggestions that have nothing to do with my tastes, however uninspired or embarrassing they may be?  Twitter+MySpace?  This is all so 20th century!

For my music company, we use Tunecore as an intermediary to submit music to the online stores, particularly iTunes and AmazonMP3.  It dawns on me that Pandora should be listed among the options that producers have for using Tunecore to distribute music, with an appropriate fee, so that Pandora can then serve as the first stop for potential customers exploring new music.  If we can trust Pandora to have music hot off the press from every group on MySpace trying to make it big—by making it easier to submit music to Pandora and get it “sequenced”—it will be a more powerful tool and will help flatten the world of online music discovery and sales.

In the end, relying on singular sources of information, including trusted friends, is an ineffective way for most people to discover art; my tastes are unique to me, even if others share some of them, and a significant share of exposure and purchase decisions are driven by pre-existing commercial success.  We already know Pandora’s “genome” method is a powerful and reliable system for discovering new songs, but people still send each other MySpace links because we still rely on personal recommendations—there is no clear alternative.

Bottom line:  I think Pandora has the potential to be the first place people go to discover new music for themselves, not just a place—much like IMDB, but even better because the recommendations are based on “song DNA” and relevant social-networking features instead of commercial success or ratings or critical reviews.  (The iTunes “Genius” is in the same vein, but Apple will always be geared toward music sales, while Pandora focuses on music exploration.)

Recommendation:  Make it easy to submit music to Pandora automatically, charge whatever fee you need, and make sure songs get sequenced in a timely manner.

Thanks for everything you do!