THE SONG DECODERS 6

Pandora claims to add about 10,000 songs a month to its library. The “curation” of Pandora, in effect, falls to Michael Zapruder, another musician who has found himself working for a tech company. Zapruder ended up as Pandora’s curator because he had a habit of identifying holes in the service’s collection. Eventually he was told to fill all the gaps he could. “I had a field day,” he recalls; he’d stroll through record stores, buying every single Johnny Cash CD or every tango disc available, plus anything that looked interesting. He paid attention to users’ suggestions. Somebody wrote in to say that Pandora needed to improve its jazz-trombone selection; somebody else complained about the dearth of barbershop-quartet music. He took care of it. He has beefed up the Latin-music and the J-pop catalog. The major acquisition project right now is Afrobeat, because by far the biggest failed search is Fela Kuti. Zapruder is in the midst of this research but knows that as this new batch of music comes online, “we’re going to get educated by our listeners.”

Every Tuesday he looks at the New Music Tipsheet, which lists a few hundred new tracks in a typical week. He scrutinizes the Billboard and CMJ charts. He hears directly from a wide array of distributors, from indie-focused Revolver Records to big shots like Universal Music Group. In addition to what is simply sent to Pandora (by labels, artists, P.R. firms), the company buys hundreds of CDs a month, as well as electronica and hip-hop downloads, acquired from sites like Beatport. Every month, hundreds of bands send songs, and Zapruder does his best to get onto Pandora what he figures his listeners want to hear. Still, the labor-intensive genome simply can’t absorb it all.

Westergren maintains that catalog size receded as a problem at around the 300,000-song mark. Since passing that, he says, the number of “missed” searches has declined markedly, so the great majority of people who come to the site and type in an artist or song name get a proper introduction to the Pandora system. But the more surprising part of Westergren’s response is his claim that he isn’t worried about compiling the biggest possible catalog. “This may seem counterintuitive,” he told me, “but we struggle more with making sure we’re adding really good stuff.” That sounds like a rather subjective, cultural judgment — shouldn’t the listener decide what’s good, based purely on the genome’s intrinsics-of-music guidance? Well, there’s no question that Westergren is a champion of the unheard music that gets marginalized by sociocultural judgments. But even he has standards.