Nashville Music Blog

Interesting article by Rob Walker in last weekend's New York Times magazine called "The Song Decoders." It's about Pandora and the people who sit around and figure out the "musical DNA," as it were, of all the songs available through the streaming music service. They do this by scoring songs as objectively as possible. Here's how one Pandora evaluator begins his assessment of a song: "Flat second, major third, perfect fourth, perfect fifth, major sixth, flat seventh." (Take that, hipsters!)

In practice, it comes out something like this: I typed in "Kings of Leon" and was told their music is characterized by "major key tonality" and "extensive vamping," among other things. After playing KOL's "Arizona," the site told me that " 'Dashboard' by Modest Mouse has similar basic rock song structures, punk influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, extensive vamping and use of a string ensemble." (It's also terrible, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

If you've ever used Pandora, you're familiar with these sorts of descriptions--flatly descriptive and neutral-sounding. I know some of you commenters out there claim that music "journalism" (by which you usually mean criticism) should be all about the music, the way Pandora is trying to be. And, of course, music writing should not be about all that other bullshit--you know, humans.

Pandora's approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That's all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora's approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

Nevermind that music is cultural information. The article continues:

Which raises interesting questions. Do you really love listening to the latest Jack White project? Do you really hate the sound of Britney Spears? Or are your music-consumption habits, in fact, not merely guided but partly shaped by the cultural information that Pandora largely screens out -- like what's considered awesome (or insufferable) by your peers, or by music tastemakers, or by anybody else? Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself? [Emphasis added.]

No, it's not possible to separate musical taste from social factors. Of course our music-consumption habits are shaped by cultural information--how could they not be? And that's not a bad thing. There are lots of non-musical reasons we love the music we love (and hate the music we hate). Some music we enjoy because of when we heard it, and who we were at the time. Of course, there's that other problem with the musical genome thing--just as you don't find everyone with green eyes attractive, you're not going to like every song with "extensive vamping." As Walker says, "What Pandora's system largely ignores is, in a word, taste."

[See also Tracy Moore's 2006 story on Pandora founder Tim Westergren.]