It turns out that Pandora has a "data journalist". She's called Liv, and she writes in AdWeek this month about the data stories she's seen on the platform.
It's interesting noticing the differences. Pandora thrives on the long-tail: music that is "ignored on terrestrial radio" - possibly because terrestrial radio is doing a good job playing the hits. There also appear to be a large amount of Nickelback fans on Pandora, too, which just goes to show that not all Pandora listeners enjoy music. Only joking. Or am I?
The idea of a “data journalist” is, at first glance, self-indulgent dot-com rubbish: not helped by some of the more ridiculous titles that these folks call themselves. For a while, last.fm had a "data griot", a man called Matthew, who wrote a long piece about what a "griot" meant.
However, it turns out that this kind of work is rather valuable: because the data that radio stations gain every day is really fascinating. It just needs someone to make sense of it all.
Ten years ago, working for a national radio station in the UK, I was wondering whether anyone actually looked at the radio screen while they were listening. We've plenty of ways of getting information there - RDS, DAB's scrolling text, or the radio player on the computer; but did anyone look?
I put a competition on there - not mentioned by anyone on-air, and with different codes per platform.
