Pandora redefined music discovery with their Music Genome Project which analyses the ‘genes’ of music to find similarities and differences on a minute level. Now they’re bringing that technology to podcasts for an all new podcast listening experience.

Personalised music experiences are a standard now technology has it’s grips in music consumption. Whether you’re listening on Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, or any other services they no doubt know your tastes and have a bunch of methods, curators, and technology to offer you up selections of music that they think you will like based on what you’ve listened to.

Pandora went about this in a very different way to their rival streaming services and created a technology they call Music Genome. It was in development for over 10 years collecting music information and using 450 parameters to break songs down to analyse their DNA and explore the ‘genes’ of music to analyse it in all new ways. This meant they could compare music on a deeper level than ever before, and Pandora are now bringing their Genome technology to podcasts for a whole new way of discovering podcasts.

The podcast genome project has now launched in public beta and hopes to introduce new podcasts to listeners based on what they already listen to. The genome project used for podcasts will now take 1500 attributes from podcasts and users’ listening histories to build up a picture of tastes that they can use to present people with tailored podcast recommendations. The genome will look at everything from which episodes you decide to listen to from a particular creator, the ratings you and others give, episodes that listeners replay and much more.

According to Pandora their natural language processing is capable of identifying topics within a podcast episode and can then even recommend you podcasts based on your taste and what is talked about in a podcast. Whilst much of it will use the genome’s automated system there will also be some curation from Pandora’s in-house team.