That's because Pandora only has about a million songs in their catalog, where iTunes has like 30 million. All Pandora has to do, and you better believe they did in order to write an article like this, is classify an unknown artist that sounds like Coldplay into the system. If you've experienced Pandora, you know that after a few weeks you hear the same music over and over on any given channel. Suffice it to say, across millions of artists and hundreds of genres, one relatively unknown artist with a lot in common with a massive artist is going to be played for a shit load of people a fuck load of times.

If you divide total Pandora royalties by the number of artists in the catalog, you'll realize that these "unknown" artists they're showcasing are outliers by a huge margin, and probably put into rotation just for a publicity purpose like this.

edit: spelling

> Pandora only has about a million songs in their catalog, where iTunes has like 30 million

That's why I don't listen to Pandora. They keep trying to replay the same old music again and again.

Frankly, I don't see anything innovative about Pandora. They just use a crude classification of songs. I already have enough of radio stations, thank you very much.

How many total artists do those million songs translate into?

They tend to classify whole albums, which would be an average of 10 songs. So, 100,000 albums. Of that, there are going to be some artists with multiple albums. You can probably estimate about 70k-80k.

Based on another stat in the article, only 800 artists earn than $50k per year. That means that while that artist is only ranked 17,000 in sales on Amazon, they happen to be in the top ~500 on Pandora.

That's a very interesting phenomenon. I wonder what the explanation is for it.

Pandora is a music discovery tool that is not based on popularity. That is, if you tell Pandora you like a certain type of music, Pandora is about as likely to play similar obscure music as it is to play similar popular music. Other similar services such as Spotify or Last.fm base their music suggestions on the person <-> song graph rather than on the attributes of the music, so they will primarily suggest very popular music (which I will flagrantly assume is well correlated with Amazon sales rankings).

Edit: Oh, I see. I assume these artists just have much better music than they have marketing. It would be interesting to know what sets them apart, though.

Right, I get what the differences in the models are between Pandora and other services. I'm referring to how the artists and/or the music itself differs that causes them to fit into this strange category.

The number of artists in Pandora's catalog is very small relative to all other mainstream services (because of the cost burden of onboarding artists into the Music Genome Project, a manual process). So, put an unknown artist that sounds like Coldplay into rotation and every user who starts a Coldplay channel is going to get them a bunch of times. Do an unknown band that sounds like Guns N Roses, same thing.

Discovery, I'd imagine. Amazon has a "you might like this" but most of the time clicking those links is not actively what you are doing on Amazon, whereas it is Pandora's whole model.

That they're more popular on Pandora than Amazon.

They've lost $92m since 2000.

I'm also wondering if those unknown artists arent possibly algorithm glitches or they just luckily match some sonic parameter so they keep coming up in the playlist. I'm so cynical :)

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/13/pandora-the-money-los...