Mike McCready

Today there’s a very interesting article on Pandora in The New York Times Magazine.

I’ve known about Pandora for a lot longer than most. Back in 2001 I co-founded a company called Polyphonic HMI (now www.uplaya.com) and we were competing head to head with a company called Savage Beast trying to sell music recommendation systems to music retailers. It’s important to keep in mind that in 2001 digital music retail didn’t exist so we were actually trying to sell software to physical music retailers like Best Buy, fye and Sam Goody.

Despite some very good sales strategies and working products, neither company was successful and we both had to go back to the lab and retool what we were doing.

Savage Beast changed their name to Pandora and used their research and technology to become an online streaming radio company. They’ve been quite successful.

At Polyphonic HMI, I went back to the drawing board and determined that making a music recommendation to an individual, based on what could be determined about their past tastes was only a little bit different from making a recommendation to an entire market based on its past tastes. Thus, my team and I developed a now-patented technology called Hit Song Science and began selling it to major and indie music labels as well as producers, radio stations and publishers.

Initially, we were very successful as well. We predicted the early success of Norah Jones before she was on anyone’s radar, that of Maroon 5 and even had our work turned into a Harvard Business School case study.

I eventually left the company in late 2005 and charted a new course with Music Xray. Ultimately, I’ve come to believe that a pure technology-driven hit prediction system is very limited it its usefulness. I stand behind the sales we made, but we learned that it’s hard to engage customers and garner the credibility of the industry when they could successfully fool the computer by analyzing Thriller or Bohemian Rhapsody only to see them score very low. It’s not easy or practical to have scientific and sometimes philosophical sales conversations in a board room as the clock is ticking, the phone is ringing and lunch is being delivered.

Computerized hit prediction is only a tool and unfortunately it has been trivialized to become a bit of a gimmick. As much as I believe in where we can eventually take it, as I’m quoted in today’s New York Times Magazine article:

“The problem with a computer reading waveforms is that it “has no common sense,” summarizes Mike McCready, a founder of a company called Music Xray, a digital-music business for entertainment companies and artists. “It doesn’t take into consideration whether the artist is just starting out or they’re at the pinnacle of their career, it doesn’t take into consideration what they wore to the Grammys or who they’re dating or what they look like or what their age is. You have to factor all of this stuff in.”

Tim Westergren, Pandora’s founder and I share not only a vision that taste filtering can and will be done ever-more-efficiently. I also feel we’re somewhat kindred souls, both having worked tirelessly for a similar number of years (and often for no money) to bring forth visions that will increase the joy and enrichment music adds to our lives.

Clearly Tim’s success in this field is well-deserved.

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