World’s Best Job: Pandora Music Analyst

How would you like the job of listening to music all day and getting paid to judge what you hear without having to write a review?

That’s what Pandora’s 26 human — not computer — analysts do all day.  They sort and catalogue Pandora’s library of some 350 genres, encompassing nearly a million tracks by 90,000 artists.

There’s a great article about the Music Genome project here.  Michelle Alexander is a senior music analyst and supervisor.

…music analysts go through thousands of songs, one by one, rating various music attributes. There are between 200 and 450 attributes for a song, according to Alexander, and pop is among the simplest. She said that the classical genome is fairly elaborate, while world music is the most elaborate.

“We basically just work pretty hard at making sure we’re all describing these things in a very uniform sort of way,” Alexander said.

Analysts rate music attributes on a five-point scale, and Alexander estimates each song takes between ten minutes to a half-an-hour to process.

“If I’m analyzing a new age solo piano track, there’s really a lot less to think about than if I’m analyzing a Frank Zappa tune,” she said. “Or if I’m analyzing a symphony by Mahler compared to a Mozart piano sonata. It kind of depends on sort of: how kitchen sinky is it?”

… Analysts listen to and dissect more than 10,000 songs a month. As the senior analyst for classical and pop music at Pandora, Alexander checks the analysts’ work.

“It’s sort of my job to kind of corral the scoring and make sure that the herd stays together and thinks as one,” she explained.

Alexander likens her job to that of a librarian. “It’s like we sort of have a very elaborate Dewey decimal system of sort of describing music,” she explained.