Pandora Media - Online Radio Streaming Service

Day - Time: 15 September 2017, h.15:00
Place: Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa - Room: C-29
Speakers
  • Puya Vahabi (Pandora, US)
Referent

Raffaele Perego

Abstract

Pandora Media (Pandora) is a personalized internet radio streaming operating mainly in United States. The company has around 80 million monthly active users, more than 2200 employees, and 1.4 billion dollars revenue in 2016. Pandoraâ??s listeners are mainly using the service in the following way: (1) they search for a particular song, artist, album or they simply introduce a keyword; (2) they create an station using that keyword; (3) they listen to an infinite stream of songs within the station. While listening to songs, they are exposed to audio and video ads (in the free version), they can change station, thumbs up or thumbs down the songs they are listening to, and much more. While there are many subscribers, unlike many other radio streaming services, pandoraâ??s main source of revenue continue to be audio/video advertisement. In this talk we will take a brief look at how radio streaming service works, and we will show some of the research challenges we are focusing on in the context of music recommendation and in the context of advertising.