Sweet Chin Music - Pandora Laying off 15% of Staff

Time once again for sweet chin music at Pandora, but hopefully this stops the fat lady from singing too soon.  My favorite online music site has been through the tough times of the dot com bust, and most recently the tyranny of those damn record companies.  So I am confident they will come out successfully on the other side. 

But for now, Tim Westergren, Joe Kennedy and team are letting go off 20 of their 140 staff members. 

Pandora does have a load of analysts, well versed in music, some extensively and classically trained, who analyze songs and classify them by very detailed multiple descriptive categories.  My guess is the majority of layoffs will affect these folks.   I do have to admit, my Pandora radio stations don't play too many new songs. 

Their sales staff is also supposed to be doing well, and I do see a lot of ads now.  Thats good - keep bringing in the revenues, guys!

Pandora, bookmark songs and artists

(posted June4, 2008)

Pandora is allowing users to bookmark favorite songs and artists.
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This is incredibly powerful - not only does it add a lot of value to the users (obviously, and very late in coming), but also in the wealth of data that Pandora can mine.

Earlier, all they had were thumbs-up or thumbs-down marks that a user could give when a song played on a station, thereby helping Pandora's algorithms in refining the station. Now there is a second level of preference available - which songs, among those the user already liked, does he/she like enough to bookmark for the future?

And as an aside, there is also the more plebian opportunity to ask users if they want to buy these songs...