Pandora, the excellent internet radio service, rolled out a great new feature last week: BackStage. The new service is powered by All Music Guide and lets you research the bands you're listening to - over 20,000 artists are listed. The Backstage area includes biographies, discographies, band photos and the option to buy music at Amazon and iTunes. The system also leverages Pandora's music matching technology: each album page delivers a list of similar albums sourced from the Music Genome Project (the database that powers Pandora). You can then drill down even further, picking an individual track and finding a list of matches.
Pandora, you might remember, finds relationships between tracks by employing trained musicians to listen to them and note down key features - you seed the radio station with some tracks you like and it automatically plays songs with similar properties. This new service will provide a nice revenue stream for Pandora, and also gives users more access to the Genome data.
