Nolan Gasser

I really wanted to like this book. The author is a ridiculously smart, erudite guy who was the primary person behind the effort to get Pandora up and running in terms of how its music selection engine works. He has an incredibly in-depth understanding of all things musical. And....that seems to be the problem. In this book, he drags the reader WAY into the weeds with technical details on, well, pretty much everything. The first half of the book is pretty much pure music theory that could probably work as a college-level textbook on the subject. I have a small amount of musical knowledge (can read simple music, some knowledge of vocal training), but was largely lost in this area.
However, the first chapter about the birth of Pandora was interesting, and a few of the interludes, particularly towards the end where they addressed psychological aspects of music taste, were somewhat interesting.
If you are a serious music scholar with great technical knowledge of music, this might be a fantastic book for you. For the average layperson who just loves listening to some music and wants to know why, I'm afraid I can't really recommend it. It's a shame, though, as the author seems like a really great guy who I'd love to have a beer with and pick his brain with specific questions.… (altro)

Self indulgent to an extreme. I can see why. Imagine you had a big CD collection you love and someone paid you to arrange your collection in different ways. And then you get to write a book about it! That was more or less his job at Pandora. Maybe this kind of life changes you.

Much like chess playing programs and other expert systems his decades of work has been superseded by machine learning which can now do this at scale and infinitely better. Must suck. But not as much as this book. To be honest I assumed Pandora music was dead, so after reading this I visited the website but apparently it's just limited to America.

In between the biographical chapters and his never ending musical criticism there's maybe a short 200 page book on the topic from the cover. Unfortunately it's hidden in a War and Peace sized one. There's no other explanation than self-indulgence.

My least favourite bit was the excruciatingly long music criticism section where he imagines 5 different music listeners (all presumably his alter egos) and goes on to analyse their exquisite and wide ranging tastes by writing about the tracks. First of all that is ridiculous and pointless but if you really want to do it why not pick real people with their real selection not your bullshit eclectic picks.

Of course then there's the long chapter where he builds an outlandish "sciency" sounding analogy that he then proceeds to do nothing with. You've build up this ridiculous contraption, would you like to use it to reveal some relationship, process or anything. No? OK. In between all this is stuff you'd read in some primary school textbook. Did you know Stravinsky was gay? No way! And Mozzart, get his, went deaf. I know, he was a composer, right? Seriously who is this book for?

The author is constantly plugging his website but this book was boring enough.… (altro)

The reality with this book, once the author gets past narrating his involvement with Pandora and their flavor of music algorithm, is that the better you're able to read music the more you will get out of it. Frankly, this is the sort of book that you dip into rather than read cover-to-cover. As for being an analysis of "musical taste," well, this is more an analysis of the structure of the more popular broad categories of music rather than being musical criticism. I would also highly recommend that you visit the companion website before digging into the book.… (altro)