By now I would assume that most of you have discovered Pandora Internet Radio. What makes Pandora so cool is that you “program” your own radio stations by providing an artist or even a song and Pandora plays that artist and then will play selections that you should enjoy based on that artist. You can continue to “fine tune” your radio station by commenting on songs with a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down”, and Pandora makes the adjustments in continued programming to play more of what you will like (and less of what you don’t like). From an indie artist viewpoint, this becomes very exciting if you can get your songs in rotation on Pandora and you can introduce a new audience to your material. Their submission instructions are sort of hidden in the FAQ section, so click here on the Pandora Submission Instructions.
The Music Genome Project®
Pandora calls this ability the Music Genome Project, and here is how they describe it, “On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever. Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”
Pandora Podcasts Provide Info To Energize Your Song
So that was all preamble to sharing the discovery of a Pandora resource page of fantastic podcasts. Pandora Presents is the title of this page of podcasts and it is aimed at listeners who might want to learn a little bit more about the criteria for their Music Genome Project of song analysis. The podcast presentations are straightforward and easy to understand, contain a bit of music theory, and tons of musical examples to illustrate the points being made.
I found the podcast on vocal harmonies very interesting and immediately started reworking some of my harmonies based on their examples. Although in some ways this is a back to basics series of programs, I found that the information being shared and the way it was being shared was really inspiring for the composition and song-writing process. Not only do I highly recommend these podcasts, but if you are ever stuck for composition ideas or looking for ways to energize a song, spend a little time on this page. Good stuff.
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