Oh, patents! Pandora

Copyright Françoise Herrmann

Pandora, that is, the Music Genome Project®, and perhaps your favorite music station!

Pandora's invention consists in designing your favorite music station as one that might contain a record of all your favorite musicians and songs, plus quite a few more that were generously suggested to you, based on an analysis of the musical "genes" and "chromosomes" of your initial likes and favorites. 

From the user’s perspective, Pandora is all about a personalized music experience, not only listening to all your existing favorites, but also discovering new music that you really like, based on personal preferences. From the distributor's perspective, Pandora offers a new method of distributing a much wider range of music by targeting individual consumer preferences directly. And, from the inventor's perspective, 23 patents are on file to disclose the various aspects of the Pandora platform, combining digital music analysis and archiving, methods of matching source songs with user preferences, playlist generation, Internet broadcasting, and satellite radio station.

The following is a list of the 23 patents pending and awarded to Pandora Media Inc.

• WO2017132589 (A1) ― 2017-08-03 - Presenting artist-authored messages directly to user via a content system 
• US2017206569 (A1) ― 2017-07-20 - Reviewing Messages Presented During a Stream of Media Content
• WO2017087333 (A1) ― 2017-05-26 - Procedurally generating background music for sponsored audio
• WO2017087012 (A1) ― 2017-05-26 - Selecting media for a social event according to specified event parameters
• US2017134498 (A1) ― 2017-05-11 - Selecting media using vehicle information
• US2017054779 (A1) ― 2017-02-23 - Media Feature Determination for Internet-based Media Streaming 
• US2017053298 (A1) ― 2017-02-23 - Increasing the Likelihood of Receiving Feedback for Content Items
• US2017041656 (A1) ― 2017-02-09 - Media channel creation based on free-form media input seeds
• US2016381103 (A1) ― 2016-12-29 - Media Content Delivery over Telephone Networks 
• US2016379274 (A1) ― 2016-12-29 - Relating Acoustic Features to Musicological Features For Selecting Audio with Similar Musical Characteristics
• US2016365936 (A1) ― 2016-12-15- Internet radio and broadcast via crowdsourcing apparatus and system 
• WO2016186718 (A1) ― 2016-11-24 - Internet radio song dedication system and method
• WO2016053892 (A2) ― 2016-04-07 - Estimation of true audience size for digital content
• WO2016053895 (A1) ― 2016-04-07 - Selecting media using inferred preferences and environmental information
• WO2016053888 (A1) ― 2016-04-07 - Country-specific content recommendations in view of sparse country data
• WO2016053555 (A1) ― 2016-04-07 - Dynamically selected background music for personalized audio advertisement
• WO2016053554 (A1) ― 2016-04-07 - Dynamically generated audio in advertisements
• WO2016049361 (A1) ― 2016-03-31 - Advertisement selection based on demographic information inferred from media item preferences
• KR20150054917 (A) ― 2015-05-20 - System and method for combining inputs to generate and modify playlists
• US2013179439 (A1) ― 2013-07-11 - Methods and Systems for Utilizing Contextual Feedback to Generate and Modify Playlists
• US2006206478 (A1) ― 2006-09-14 - Playlist generating methods
• US2006212442 (A1) ― 2006-09-21 - Methods of Presenting and Providing Content to a User
• US7003515 (B1) ― 2006-02-21 - Consumer item matching method and system

References

Pandora Media Inc.
https://www.pandora.com/about
Pandora Music Genome Project®
https://www.pandora.com/about/mgp