This episode was previously published on the Profitable Musician Show.

Pandora has been a longstanding institution in terms of streaming platforms. It has been around for 20 years or so. Jamie Freedman works on the Creator Services team at Pandora and programs Classical Music and is here to talk about how Pandora is an invaluable tool for developing connections between established artists and labels and their fans.

Jamie is from California. She grew up in the industry and decided to do music education. She got her Bachelor’s degree in Ethnomusicology from the University of Michigan and her Master’s degree from the University of Texas in Austin. She loved the academia and was working for nonprofit theaters on the side, like the Kennedy Center and regional theaters selling tickets, because she loves arts and performing arts. She eventually left the academia when she moved to the Bay Area.

She had her own little consulting company for some time, and she worked with bands, artists, and other startups. She eventually landed a job at Pandora years later. She helps folks using the Artist Marketing Platform on Pandora, and as a trained opera singer, she also programs classical music on the side. She likes hanging out with and helping musicians. Her passion is to help musicians make their music accessible to whoever wants to hear it.

Jamie broke up with the academia because she felt that the people there were out of touch with what was happening around them. She also feels that academic life is a grind. She still teaches now but in another way.

AMP is a platform to help artists who have music spinning on Pandora to reach their fans who are already listening and to reach new fans. For discoverability, Pandora’s sweet spot is to discover the ability element of it. They have tools to help boost tracks and give context to tracks. You can add little voice messages or what they at Pandora call “artists audio messages”. They have Pandora stories. They also have a heat map that tells you where people are geographically located. It can help you plan your tours. They also have a lot of cool interactive tools.

Pandora has been around for 20 years. Their bread and butter is the Music Genome. Songs are given a genome by music analysts then it goes into a huge database. The Music Genome analyzes the music when you play a song. Listeners also do thumbs up and thumbs down on playlists. User engagement helps formulate what you and other people listened to.

Spotify jumped in around 2011 and they were better with the on-demand stuff, and Pandora got in on that late. Pandora only focuses in the United States.

Pandora has a new feature called Modes. When you go in, and you play a station, you can click on a different mode, and what it does is it pulls out different kinds of tracks. You can go to Discovery Mode, which will play artists that you might not know about, smaller artists, you can choose Deep Cuts, which is artists that you know but maybe recordings you have never heard, so outtakes, B sides, remixes or something. There are also new releases, and not every station has this. It depends on the station. They also have curated modes. If you go to a genre station or some of the artists’ stations have them, you can listen to a Hosted Mode, where you will hear an artist talking about a genre that they are in, and then they will walk you through it. It’s more like a radio show. It’s cool.

They also have AMP Fresh Cuts where you can get on a station, spinning, and get moving. If you are not in the US, ask an American friend to play your PlayStation. That will help the gears running.

If you know that you have submitted to Pandora and it’s not live, you can submit the music, and there are links on AMP for all that. If you see it live but you don’t have a station and you are not able to claim your account, then you need to get your music analyzed, and that’s the Submit button, too. Once you are up and spinning, you should be good to go. You should have access to your AMP account, and you can use all the tools like the artist’s audio messages, featuring tracks, and stuff.

We want to make it easier for you to communicate with your fans. We’ve got the webinars, the socials, and there’s AMP Fresh Cuts. You should listen to that. It’s an eclectic mix of up-and-coming artists who are using AMP like yourselves. You can pitch songs to us. They have to be less than two months old. It has to be new. AMP.Pandora.com, that’s the one thing you want to take away.

Links mentioned in this episode:
AMP.Pandora.com