Lucia here, from Pandora.

You’re not reading too much into the Music Genome Project at all, but you might be reading a bit too much into which and how many descriptions show up when you ask Pandora, “why is this song playing.”

Please keep in mind that only a tiny percentage of the musicological traits that we analyze are listed on the music player; there’s just no room for the whole list! You can see a few more if you click on the song title *while listening on the web, not a phone* …. the info page for that song will come up, and that list is usually a bit longer.

But generally speaking, yes, our analysis of jazz songs is more complex than that of pop songs. Lots of the staff here at Pandora are jazz fiends and/or currently performing jazz musicians, in fact. It’s just that not all of that complexity shows up in the music player descriptions.

Each song you hear on Pandora is analyzed along literally hundreds of musicological attributes. These cover all the details of melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, vocal performance, compositional qualities, lyrics and more. We have an on-site staff of about 45 professional musicians who painstakingly rate songs for these traits — it can take them as long as 30 minutes to do a single song. They have strong backgrounds in music theory, and go through extensive training before joining the team. From all of this analysis, Pandora is able to match up songs for your radio stations.

Here’s a thorough article on us, if you care to read more. It’s some of our very earliest press, but it’s still my favorite article because it describes how our employees musically “analyze” a song, Pandora-style:
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/2006-01-11/news/pandora-s-box/

Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for your musicological interest!

Lucia, with Pandora

I will say, though that I found Super Colossal to be super boring. There wasn’t a lot of life to it. Still some good playing, but boring. Satchfunkilus seems to have fixed a lot of there, but there are still tracks that are boring to me.