Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project Will Help You Find the Next Audio Show to Binge

BY Evan Selleck

Published 13 Nov 2018

Pandora announced a new Genome Project, this one meant to help discover podcasts, earlier this year. And now the feature is rolling out in beta form.

The Podcast Genome Project is designed like Pandora’s Music Genome Project, which means that a combination of algorithms and human curation working in the background will aim to find you new podcasts in the same way that Pandora was designed to help you find new music to listen to. Your individual listening preferences are taken into account by the in-house team, but also 1500 attributes that will build a picture of what you like to listen to, and what you might like to listen to next.

The Podcast Genome Project’s abilities can get pretty granular. According to Pandora, it is not only capable of keeping track of which podcasts you rate, but also the podcast episodes you skip, and which episodes you may play more than once. Going even further, the new Genome Project can also use natural language processing to determine the content of a specific podcast episode, which can then lead to additional episodes of a similar topic from a different podcast source.

Here are the major bullet points:

  • The Podcast Genome Project evaluates content based on over 1,500 attributes and listener signals including thumbs, skips and replays, and utilizes machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, and collaborative filtering methods for listener preferences.
  • And, similar to the Music Genome Project, the Podcast Genome Project combines these techniques with our expert in-house curation team to offer episode-level podcast recommendations.
  • At launch, Pandora has partnered with top-tier publishers including APM, Gimlet, HeadGum, Libsyn, MaxFun, NPR, Parcast, PRX+PRI, reVolver, Slate, The New York Times, The Ramsey Network, The Ringer, WNYC Studios, and Wondery, and will continue to feature existing podcast content including Serial, This American Life and Pandora’s original Questlove Supreme, with many more to come in the future.

If you want to sign up for the early beta, you can do so through the source link below. Or if you prefer to wait for the public launch, that will happen in the “coming weeks”.

Are you going to use Pandora to discover new podcasts?

[Podcast Genome Project]