Come for the Ride!

There’s not a lot of “web 2.0″ sites that get me excited. I’m perfectly happy with my “web 1.0″ forums. Facebook is nice for keeping up with friends and Twitter is a pretty novel idea too. However, this is one site that I believe WILL infact have a long and lasting impact on at least one section of our society and that is Pandora and it’s possible effects on the future of the music business.

Sure, Pandora is great because it’ll match up your “musical DNA” with that of others and uses the information to create a database of artists that you’ll like to listen to. In a way, it’s a Google for music. It’s not about advertising and money in order to get airtime. It’s about a conflagration of the musical likes and dislikes of everyone else who listens to Pandora. It’s “SongRank” (my term, not theirs) database is pleasing to my ears as it not only keeps out the stuff I don’t want to listen to, but more importantly, and more to the point, it introduces me to music that others who like the same stuff I do listen to. So, what does this have to do with “the revolution” you say?

Let’s say you’re a small rock band in Ireland, trying to make your way into the big time. You play at local pubs and have a nice weekend gig, but your dream is playing at Madison Square Garden. Even if you do get “big” in the UK, getting into the US market is still a huge undertaking. Unless you have a huge amount of money to tour and promote yourselves, the odds are you’ll just be another indie rock band. However, you and your 4 band mates signed up for Pandora accounts. You each add yourself to your favorite music and then pick out some similar music from U2, Keane, The Rolling Stones and similar rock bands. You’ve now melded yourself into the Musical DNA of Pandora. It’s not a full proof method of becoming the next Springstein, but it’s yet another tool that will move the power away from large corporate labels and into the hands of the bands themselves and it will surely get people listening to your music who may have otherwise never heard of  you.

Now, getting your music onto Pandora will be a task in and of itself. I don’t know where they extract their music from, but the point is that indie bands have a VERY powerful tool in getting their music to people who might not otherwise hear it. I can’t see Pandora shunning small bands as they would, concievably, want as much music on there as possible. By no means is a search engine marketer going to replace a band manager, but unique and trend-setting tools like Pandora, YouTube and MySpace make being a small, emerging band just a little easier these days.