Founded in 2000 by Tim Westergren, Pandora has over 18 million registered users and has played 4.7 billion songs. Users type in the name of a favorite song or artist and the Genome Project quickly scans over 600,000 analyzed songs to find songs with interesting musical similarities to the choice of the listener. The Music Genome Project is the most sophisticated taxonomy of musical information ever collected. Pandora does not use machine-listening or other forms of automated data extraction. Instead, each song is analyzed using up to 400 distinct musical characteristics by a trained music analyst. These attributes capture not only the musical identity of a song, but also the many significant qualities like melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, and lyrics that are relevant to understanding the musical preferences of listeners that generates personalized streaming radio for computer. Pandora currently has over 60,000 artists, 70% of whom are independent artists.
