On Nov. 13 the Pandora Podcast Genome Project launched, expecting to do for podcasts what the iconic Music Genome Project did in the early days of streaming music recommendation. To this day their high-quality music recommendations distinguish their brand, so now they are going after the 83 percent of Americans who do not listen to at least one podcast each week. They're coming for you.
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Pandora claims its podcast recommendations benefit from the ease of labeling a podcast's content, offering more categories for analysis and comparison than most music. More people listening to podcasts is likely to mean more people listening to music podcasts in particular, but it's unknown how well music content will fare if there is a surge in listening. Regardless, Pandora proposes to be the agent who finds what you will be most interested in for yourself.
"With the introduction of podcasts, listeners can now easily enjoy all of their audio interests — music, comedy, news, sports or politics — on Pandora, the streaming service that knows their individual listening habits the best," said Pandora Chief Product Officer Chris Phillips. "The Podcast Genome Project's unique episode-level understanding of content knows exactly what podcast you'll want to discover next, and will serve it up through a seamless in-product experience that is uniquely personalized to each listener and will continue to grow with their tastes over time."
Initial podcast publishers in partnership with Pandora on the project include The New York Times, NPR and Slate. Phillips explains that, similar to their Music Genome Project, the new podcast suggestions are built from a combination of both human and machine scanning to find the details they see as most important to keep your ears happy.
"We use humans for the quality and machines for the scaling. An example would be picking up on a new topic that is starting to be discussed in podcasts," explains Phillips. "On Questlove Supreme [a Pandora original podcast], when Questlove was interviewing Jermaine Dupri, deep into the conversation they started discussing Atlanta politics...It's a needle in a haystack. So, we would analyze those types of discussion, and our curation team might be scanning those if they're showing up inside a podcast, and they'll create a new tag that then goes out and looks across all the podcasts we have, and that might become a new search term."
As reported by Billboard, Pandora will be releasing the Podcast Genome Project to 1 percent of users today, and those not selected can sign up to request early access here. Once a Pandora user has access to the new offering, a podcast section will appear alongside their music in the app and offer suggestions for new shows you may want to try.
