Platinum vinyl record for Pandora's 10 billionth thumb in 2016 (Photo by Christoph Dernbach via Getty Images)
Before Pandora’s personalized internet radio service launched in 2005, there was Savage Beast Technologies. From 2000 to 2004, the company focused on building out its music-recommendation technology, the Music Genome Project. Pioneered by founder Tim Westergren, the Music Genome Project had humans, in the form of skilled musicians, listening to songs to uncover and annotate their musical attributes.
Remarkably, music analysts are still listening to songs today. Many aspects of how streaming music platforms provide song recommendations has shifted to computers and machine learning, but not all. There are still analysts doing the same work they have for the last 20 years. We talked to several analysts, past and present, to get a sense of how they work today, 20 years after the Music Genome Project’s inception.