From The Desk Of Camper Van Beethoven’s Jonathan Segel: Pandora

La Costa Perdida (429) kicks off Camper Van Beethoven’s 30th-anniversary year amidst an orchestrated (if deserving) surge in recognition for the group—everything from Paul Rudd donning a vintage Camper concert tee in the film This Is 40 to glowing quotes from members of R.E.M. and the Meat Puppets. The LP is CVB’s first album since 2004’s New Roman Times and was mostly recorded at multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Segel’s Oakland home studio a year prior to his move to Sweden. “The process was similar, perhaps, to the recording of Camper’s third album, in that we could experiment and had time to work on things,” says Segel. “The first two CVB albums were recorded in a weekend.” Segel will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on the band.

Segel: I know that there’s a lot of anti-Pandora sentiment expressed in The Trichordist and other pro-musician’s rights areas that focuses on the royalty rate that they pay. In point of fact, most of the hullabaloo seems to be serving to cloud the fact that only streaming radio online pays performance royalties (in the US, that is … and North Korea and China) and that terrestrial radio doesn’t. Indeed that performance royalty rate is low, and the amount that streaming radio pays to rights holders for broadcast (i.e. BMI/ASCAP/SESAC) is weirdly based on a “percentage of income” and then divided at BMI/ASCAP in mystical ways, so it will never be comparable to terrestrial radio. Pandora is just a focal point of this current argument against IRFA due to Tim Westergren being extremely vocal politically, and the company being monetarily political as well.

Which brings me to a second point about why someone might wonder why I am writing about Pandora: I used to work there and got fired for continuing to “question decisions that had already been made” by the company. In fact, as per usual, I had to continuously speak my conscience, and that was really not what a company of any sort wants, especially, it seems, after they become a publicly traded commodity and are beholden to shareholders to make money, more money. And this even though my job title was “Listener Advocate.” (Actually, this meant that ultimately all that I did was answer emails, despite my background.) And one of the things that Tim, specifically, didn’t want to hear was that since he himself is active politically on behalf of the company, these things make the company politically responsible.

So, Spotify made direct label deals and continues to do so, meaning that at this point you either have negotiators or you take what they offer. The idea that Pandora is arguing is of the statutory rate, a standardized rate.

But beyond royalties, here’s the thing: As far as product goes, Pandora is the best. The recommendation engine outshines any other “radio” algorithm by far, even though it’s been molded to cater to the idiot segment that simply wants middle-of-the-dial FM hits all day long. If you narrow your starting seeds to a specific song or piece or performance, you can find new music that will curl your toes. Spotify simply cannot do that. Last.FM, Rdio and IheartRadio all seem to peter out too soon. Now that I live in the land of Spotify, where we don’t have Pandora, I’m a little bummed. I know lots of people say that they love Spotify, but frankly I am not interested in making playlists, I want radio discovery. Plus I have a lingering distrust of Daniel Ek, which haunts me every time I look for something to listen to on Spotify, I just feel the robbery.

When I lived in Oakland, I would listen to local college radio on my way to and from work, or anytime we were in the car, and KFJC was the best, followed by KALX and KUSF (whose frequency was sold by USF recently!). We were incredibly lucky to have so many good stations; when people visited from out of town and we went for a drive in the car, you could guarantee that you would hear something that would blow their minds. KFJC is phenomenal, similar to WFMU on the East Coast, real free-form radio.

Taking something I heard on KFJC and starting a Pandora station with it was a goldmine. I learned of some great music that I hadn’t found before, and even amazing composers I didn’t know about. Again, people say “oh Pandora’s only got a million songs, while Spotify has 10 times that,” but check it out: First off, a million songs at an average of four minutes is like 66,666 hours, or 2,778 days, about seven-and-a-half years of music. I challenge anyone to listen to all of it. And the key to Pandora is (or was) the genomic matching algorithm, so not every song on every album was analyzed, but what was was done by humans, so the matching isn’t (or wasn’t) strictly based on meta-tagging but on musical traits. Admittedly this will never match the contextualization that a human DJ can use to put completely disparate pieces of music together in a radio set, but it can serve as a matching algorithm that can find new artists for you, and if you’re not a lazy shit, you can go do some research yourself.

This is especially true on Pandora if you aren’t a listener of today’s hits, where the stations will basically only play crap that you could hear anywhere unless you actively avoid it*. It’s sort of sad that Pandora has to cater to this audience to maintain high numbers of listeners. The reality is that the majority of online or terrestrial radio listeners do not want to hear anything that they don’t already know. That’s why terrestrial stations play things so often, so the “what I tell you three times is true” psychology will kick in.

I have had incredible Pandora stations set up for 20th-century classical music, for avant-garde jazz and other improv, for many types of baroque music, etc. I’ve even set up stations on my own songs and found bands or songs that I love, for example the High Strung and Essex Green, not that I sound like either of these bands in any way, but I guess the algorithm thought there was some similarity. I miss Pandora.

*I somewhat proudly admit that while I have read the term “gangnam style” a thousand times, I don’t actually know what it means, nor do I really have any desire to find out.

Video after the jump.