Now that Caleb Brumbelow’s new album “When I was sick” will be sitting on virtual music shelves all over the web (via TuneCore), we must concoct ways to draw people to those shelves and to his website. I am convinced that if the right listeners are exposed to his music, they will find (as I have) a deep, calming, healing, and somehow joyful experience in his lyrics and music.

Luckily for me, Pandora and services like it are streamlining this process of connecting people with music they really want to hear. Pandora is an online streaming radio service that learns what a listener likes, and gives them more of it. For Caleb, this means that his music will be exposed to listeners who crave the kind of music he produces. His music will be played right alongside Imogen Heap, Bjork, even Radiohead…. I’ve also heard that the Pandora iPhone App is one of the hottest available downloads right now. Learn more about Pandora.

It takes about 15 minutes to get your music into Pandora (well 15 minutes of your time – more like a few weeks until the music is live) Getting in to the system is relatively easy, if you have a physical CD to send:

Step 1: Prepare materials

  1. Download, print and sign the Pandora agreement here: http://blog.pandora.com/faq/submission_agreement.pdf
  2. Prepare your CD: Remove shrink wrap, tape, etc. Make sure your CD has your email address on it. Make sure your CD has a valid UPC. Pandora receives thousands of CD’s per day – make yours an easy one to deal with. They get album artwork from Amazon.com, so get your music to Amazon as well sometime soon.
  3. Prepare a few pages of bio information (if you want and have time). Nothing crazy, just good info about your music and/or press releases.

Step 2: Package and send out materials to:

Pandora
Attn: Music Genome Project Indie Submission
360 22nd Street, Suite 440
Oakland, CA 94612

That’s about it. The amount of time it takes for you music to go live in Pandora seems to vary quite a bit, from album to album. I’ve had success following up with Pandora using either of these email addresses:

pandora-support@pandora.com
Listener Support and Product Feedback Inquiries

suggest-music@pandora.com
Suggest Music for Inclusion in the Music Genome Project

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 3:04 pm.
Categories: An Experiment.

One Comment, Comment or Ping

  1. Understanding and using Last.fm - Sep 30th, 2008

Reply to “Pandora”