Pandora Internet Radio-- DMO to the Stars
Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
-Plato
Manovich and Murray delineate a number of characteristics that each feels a digital media object should possess. Even with the progression of time since the most primitive Digital Media Objects, these attributes still apply to a number of digital media objects today. One such DMO is Pandora Internet Radio, which I will compare here.
Pandora Internet radio, often known simply as “Pandora” is an “automated music recommendation service and ‘custodian’ of the Music Genome Project,” says Wikipedia. Upon creation of one’s account, the user may opt to listen to a premade genre station, each comprised of a number of songs which share qualities such as tonality or chord progression. However, the user can also create a new station—a maximum of 100, notes the site—with a new blend of artists merely by choosing that option on the menu. Then, he or she can “add variety” by suggesting what other artists he or she would like to hear, a feature further supplemented the site’s own suggestions of artists whose musical styles fit the user’s aforesaid guidelines. When listening to a station, the user continually provides feedback via a “thumbs up”, a “thumbs down”, or other actions that appear in a drop-down menu for each song. Furthermore, the user reserves the right to skip a song if he/she wishes, but with a mandatory limit of six times per hour, per station—a figure that has changes several times with the evolution of the site. The service narrows its selection based upon all of these interactions and determines what songs should be played, and how much so. These selections do not transcend the station that they were made in regards to, so all subsequent additions are made for each individual station. Inherently, users may move songs to other stations if it does not fit the where it primarily appeared. Every so often, Pandora will momentarily pause its streaming for a commercial or two from its sponsors—a feature that can be disabled by upgrading to a premium account for a nominal fee. Likewise, participating in certain sponsored activities such as watching commercials allows the user to enjoy uninterrupted streaming for four hours.
Several versions of Pandora have developed, the very first founded in 2000 by Savage Beast Technologies, then run by Will Glaser, Jon Craft, and Tim Westergreen. The service finally upgraded to a radio service in 2005, and now boasts over 200 million users as a platform that can be used on one’s phone, computer, iPad etc. with mere internet connection.
Manovich identifies certain qualities that all digital media objects supposedly share. One of these is modularity, which he defines this as the representation of media elements as collections of discrete samples . Evidently, this quality apparently contributes much to the site’s set up. Songs still retain their individual qualities despite being grouped with other songs, for example.
Murray also identifies several affordances of the digital medium, which I found apply to Pandora as well. One of these, a DMO's encyclopedic nature, refers to the ability of computer to not only to compile an incredible amount of data, but for it to continue accumulating over time. Murray points out that this quality affords the medium the ability to collect and access information, save physical space, and contextualize data. Conversely, the encyclopedic nature of a digital media object discourages recollection and cognition skills, along with interpersonal contact.
As is the case with Pandora, a vast amount of information resides in a massive database, thus allowing users access to any published song or musician with uncanny ease. If one attempted a physical recreation of this database, the sheer number of CD’s, records, and other files would likely fill several rooms. What’s more, sorting through this information would necessitate much more attention to detail, thus consuming an incredible amount of time, and potentially leading to greater imprecision in its management.
Another affordance that I deemed particularly applicable was a digital Media Object's modularity. This affordance refers to the structural nature of the digital media object, a feature Murray describes as being able to “represent and execute conditional behaviors” (Murray, 51). The more options a program has, the more widely used it will be, he continues. Through the creation of algorithms and the abstractions of behaviors, programmers anticipate the path that the computer will take to respond to the user’s input. As thus, this quality does not determine interaction, it affords the user options, which leads to emergence—unplanned behaviors—with varying responses.
Below is a slightly more in-depth explanation, with a visual walk-through for added convenience.