Re:Sounds like a plan, but... (Score 3, Informative)

We don't have any concept of "tags" associated with music. We have a room full of musician analysts, and they listen to songs all day scoring each song on ~400 characteristics. Basically, they create a ~400 dimensional vector for each analyzed song. When you create a station based on a particular artist and/or song, you'll hear songs that are the weighted sum of delta squares across these ~400 dimensions. As you give us positive and negative feedback about the music you hear in a station, we bias the weightings for future playlist generation. It's under constant development, but that's a brief summary of how it works under the covers.

About labels paying us to have their songs indexed, I have trouble seeing that happen. We already buy every CD on all the major labels and analyze them. We also buy every CD from independent musicians that we can get our hands on. All the people here buying the music are independent musicians, so they tend to have a proclivity for independent music. Working here, you get exposed to so much under-the-radar music at times it can be overwhelming.

Also, if you are an independent musician and want to submit your music for analysis, we accept submissions. Drop an email to suggest-music at pandora dot com and Michael will write you back about how that works.

Cheers.

-- Eric
Software Guy @ Pandora