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MIND AND MACHINE

Feel like you’re living in a Wes Anderson movie with Pandora’s new playlists

Personalized Soundtracks use AI technology to make you the ideal playlist.

Feel like you’re living in a Wes Anderson movie with Pandora’s new playlists

[Photo: StockSnap/Pixabay]

BY Melissa Locker1 minute read

Pandora, which is fiercely clutching to its title as the largest U.S. streaming music provider, just launched a new service that will help you feel like you’re living in your own private Wes Anderson movie—or Quentin Tarantino flick or, if you’re really into Hans Zimmer, even Jurassic Park.

Personalized Soundtracks are curated playlists created just for you and you alone, based on your habit of listening to Beach House, Beach Slang, Beach Boys, Beach Fossils, and beach goth back to back. The soundtracks are updated each week, too, so you’ll never ever get tired of the same songs.

The algorithmically generated playlists include songs chosen by the state-of-the-art machine learning model that studies your musical tastes and feeds it back to you in the form of new music to explore paired with songs you already love. The effort is boosted by Pandora’s Music Genome, a “hand-labeled” database of the 60 million tracks in its catalog that identifies over 400 specific attributes, including genre, vocals, emotions, and instrumentation, and compositional elements, supplemented by third-party metadata, including tracks annotated by experts. In a win for the continued employment of humans, the in-house curation team also has a hand in the playlist creation.

Pandora started testing the feature back in March and today they rolled it out to anyone who has shelled out for a premium subscription. If that’s you, simply go to the “Featured Playlists” section of “Browse” in your mobile app and start soundtracking your life like you’re starring in Baby Driver.

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The news comes the same day that the Nielsen-owned Gracenote announced its Sonic Style service, an AI-fueled music descriptor system that will help the music industry make soundtracks. In short: If video didn’t kill the DJ, the machine-learning-driven music services might.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Melissa Locker is a writer and world renowned fish telepathist. More


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