Pandora – Helping the Viral Spread

Ever since my friend told me about Pandora while we were preparing the Thanksgiving dinner several months ago (“Let us just play Pandora and we won’t have to worry about the music”) I have it on every time I am sitting on a computer, regardless of whether I am at home or out. I think it is just great for a lazy music aficionado like me – you need not worry about spending hours making play lists, you just enter a song or an artist’s name and let Pandora do the work.
By definition, since it is an entertainment site, Pandora is geared more towards the experiential users. However, with is clean design the site might also be appealing to task-oriented users that are simply looking for content sites. The site allows you to create a profile where you can enter your personal information and, more importantly, your music preferences. Based on that you can search for stations that play the kind of music you like, or you can create your own station that plays only songs/artists selected by you or those similar to them. If you like multiple styles you can create separate stations for all of them. And if you sometimes feel like listening an eclectic mix of your preferred styles, you can use the “Quick mix” option that allows you to mix any number of stations you like. In addition to helping you find and listen to your favorite songs/artists, the site also has blog where the site users can post any questions and have them answered or simply leave a comment on any topic of interest. Recently, they started a new initiative delivering the responses to users’ question in the form of videos. This tactic is good in helping people create a sense of connection to the site. Pandora also has a video series on concerts, studios and music history, or musicology as they call it.

The site totally delivers on its brand promise – “To play music you’ll love – and nothing else.” If you are as curious as I am, you are probably wondering how it is able to do that. The key to success is called the Music Genome Project. And don’t worry, this has nothing to do with biology, or almost nothing. So what is it? In the most basic sense, the Music Genome Project is attempting to uncover and distill the essence of music. To be able to do that the creators of the project have identified a set of 400 attributes or “genes” that capture not only the musical identity of a song, but also the many significant qualities that are relevant to understanding the musical preferences of listeners. The analysis of each unique genome culminates into the magical musical identity of a song. This identity often has nothing to do with 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. So every time you enter a song name Pandora scans it library of hundreds of songs to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice.

To avoid litigations the site does not allow users to download any content. Instead, while listening, users are offered the ability to buy the songs or albums at Amazon.com or iTunes Store. Since more and more people, and specifically young people, listen to music while they are not on their computers, Pandora is also available on mobile phones for the subscribers to the AT&T and Sprint networks. All they need to do is enter their phone number and they get the application sent to their phone for free in a text message. And while all this sounds great, we all know we live in an era when nothing is absolutely free.

So here is the deal – the service actually has two subscription options – you can either create a free account, which is supported by advertising, or select a fee-based subscription, which is ad-free. As a college student I went for “free,” of course. I was thinking that since I was just going to log in, turn on the station I want and then do something else it didn’t really matter whether they had advertising or not, I wasn’t going to see it anyways. Interestingly, this turned out not to be the case. Well, I surely can’t not name all the companies that I have seen ads for but I know that Facebook, weather.com and Verizon are definitely up there. And what is even better for marketers, I am not annoyed by the fact they are there. Probably because there is just one ad for every log in that is on the side of my profile; it is not inhibiting me, it is not big, bold and shiny, but I’ve noticed it. And I don’t mind it.

And it seems I am not the only one who is in love with the site. According to an analysis on Digital Media Wire, the market share of US visits to Pandora increased by 634% from November 2005 to November 2006, while the market share of visits to the Last.fm website increased by “only” 172% in the same period. According to another report by JP Morgan, in December 2007, the traffic to Pandora grew for sixth month in a row to 4 million. This represented a 4.9% increase over the previous month. For comparison, total traffic Internet pure plays remained flat for the same period.

As every person with online presence I could not stop myself from jealously wondering how Pandora was able to achieve that. How did all these people hear about it? A little Google-ing sheds some light no that. If you try searching for “radio,” “online radio,” “free radio,” or “listen free radio” the Pandora appears on the top of the list as the first or second sponsored link. So probably ad words buy never hurts. But it seems Pandora is doing more than that because the site also comes up in top positions in the organic search whenever you type “radio” (2^nd result), “online radio” (1^st), “listen free” (2^nd), “listen free music” (3^rd), “listen free music online” (4^th), “listen favorite music” (2^nd), “Pandora” (1^st result; even before the mythological Pandora), “genome project” (2^nd result after a biological site), “new music” (the site is still on the 1^st page – 5^th result – but is behind AOL.music and MTV).

It is hard to say how Pandora has been able to achieve such high positioning on Google since the search engine would never reveal the exact algorithm it uses to calculate the relevance of a link depending on your search. However, we can get a broad sense of what Pandora is doing by looking at such things title tags, site content, headlines, URLs and meta tags.

The title tag is the text appearing in the blue frame of your search window. Generally, it should be descriptive of the content on the site and contain words that people might use when searching for the type of content that you offer. Pandora’s title tag reads “Listen to free Internet radio, find new music.” Including the word “free” that tends to be favored among all people is always a good thing, as well as having such category title like “radio.”

As it regards site content, the first 200 characters appearing on the page are the most important ones. One good thing about the Pandora site is that it is very clean and only music related information on it. So the first things that appear when you open the site include “music,” “now playing,” “what’s new” and “genre stations” – words that probably help the algorithm in its relevance search. There is no extraneous stuff, and that is why not only Google but I also love it.

Pandora also uses meta tags. These are words or phrases interweaved in the code of the Web site that are not visible to the visitors but that help in the search engine optimization process. Pandora’s meta tag reads “Pandora radio is the personalized internet radio service that helps you find new music based on your old and current favorites. Create custom web radio stations, listen free.” As with the title tag, key words like “radio,” “free,” “music,” “new” and “favorite” are included.

In addition to these search engine optimization tactics, the site also gives users the opportunity to send a link to their friends via email for the station they have found or created. Personally, I think that word-of-mouth and viral tactics are the main ways in which the site gained popularity. Maybe because all the people that I know of say they’ve heard about Pandora from a friend. And probably the fact that the site delivers on its brand promise helps as well.