Submitting music to Pandora is easier than ever

Over the past decade, Pandora Internet Radio has become one of the go-to destinations for music discovery. The popular radio service allows over 76 million active users to create customized stations based on their favorite genres and artists. Pandora’s recommendation engine (built on extensive human input) then streams a playlist that is altered by user engagement in real-time. In other words, Pandora is pretty smart at picking the playlist to start with, but the listener can give feedback (a simple thumbs up or down) and then Pandora gets even smarter!

For independent artists, getting music on Pandora can be a great way to build an audience without spending thousands on radio promotion or advertising. If you sound like Coldplay, whenever someone creates a Pandora station based on the music of Coldplay—bam!—your music could get served up, hopefully earning you a new fan or download sale (since Pandora also displays buy links).

But how do you get your music onto Pandora as an independent artist? It’s pretty easy, actually, especially since they began accepting submissions for digital-only albums a few months ago. Yep, pretty easy — except for one small detail, which we’ll discuss below. But first, here’s the simple steps for submitting music to Pandora.

How to submit your music to Pandora

1. Make sure you control the legal rights to your work.

2. Make your music available on iTunes, Amazon, CD Baby, or Bandcamp.

3. Log into your Pandora account. If you don’t have a Pandora account, create one HERE.

4. Go to Pandora’s Submit Your Music page. If you’re in a country that doesn’t have Pandora, just write to musicandcomedy@pandora.com and they’ll create an account for you.

5. Provide Pandora with details about your submission, including your band name, release information, link to artist bio, and valid links to one or two songs on iTunes (US), Amazon, CD Baby, or Bandcamp.

6. Verify your submission.

7. Wait. 

Yep. Now you’ll have to wait an estimated six weeks to get an acceptance or rejection from Pandora (if it’s an acceptance, they’ll request that you send the whole album) — which brings us to that one little detail I talked about above: not everyone’s music will get accepted into Pandora’s catalog, an extensive collection of songs that is curated by a team of musicologists and powered by a taxonomy of musical data called The Music Genome Project.

How does The Music Genome Project work?

Since so much of Pandora’s curation work is hands-on, it’s no wonder there’s a significant wait time for response, especially when you consider the huge amount of submissions they receive each week.

Here’s a little bit about the team of people who’ll be considering your music, and how your music is further analyzed and cataloged if you DO get accepted. According to Pandora:

Each song in the Music Genome Project is analyzed using up to 450 distinct musical characteristics by a trained music analyst. These attributes capture not only the musical identity of a song, but also the many significant qualities that are relevant to understanding the musical preferences of listeners. The typical music analyst working on the Music Genome Project has a four-year degree in music theory, composition or performance, has passed through a selective screening process and has completed intensive training in the Music Genome’s rigorous and precise methodology. To qualify for the work, analysts must have a firm grounding in music theory, including familiarity with a wide range of styles and sounds.

What qualifies your music for inclusion in Pandora’s catalog

And what exactly is this team of music experts looking for exactly?

As Michael Zapruder (Pandora’s music curator, and a great songwriter too IMHO) explains:

For unknown bands, the fundamental question we have to answer is: will fans of this kind of music be excited to discover this on Pandora stations?

We also consider how the submission might add to our existing collection. We may have more of a need for Black Metal, a less visible genre, than for something more common like Indie Rock (that’s not to say that we close the door on any genres, but the state of our collection sometimes comes into play).

We have a few basic internal guidelines for listening to every submission.

For one thing, our reviewers never have to give a reason for accepting music, but they always have to explain their decision if they are rejecting something. This only seems fair to us.

Also, we try to keep our personal musical preferences out of the decision-making process. The fact that a reviewer may not enjoy Darkwave or East Coast Hip Hop or anything else really has no place in the decision about whether our listeners would embrace that music.

We are looking for excellence. Tim, Pandora’s founder, often says: “You have to earn your way into Pandora.” We try to make good decisions about whether the music lives up to that high standard.

When it’s all said and done, though, we know that with music and art we can’t ever be 100% sure we’re making the right call. We can never completely transcend our own subjectivity. Our way around that is to keep it simple: we try as hard as we can to give your music a fair hearing. We do our best to be conscientious with your work.

If we do get it wrong (and we do sometimes), we’ll find out about it; and when we see your music being reviewed or appearing on a chart somewhere, or when you’re playing the Fox Theater here in Oakland, we’ll make sure to get it into the collection right away!

Best of luck to everyone who is considering submitting their music or has already done so, and thanks from all the reviewers here for your interest in being a part of Pandora.

——-

Hopefully all this information is helpful to you in submitting your music to Pandora. If your music is accepted, be sure to register with SoundExchange, an organization that pays digital performance royalties to artists, labels, and performers for the usage of sound recordings online. Heck, even if Pandora doesn’t accept your music, you should still register with SoundExchange; there may be plenty of other internet radio stations that are interested in playing your music.

Have you submitted your music to Pandora? Did it get accepted or rejected? What was the process like? Let us know in the comments section below.

Via CDBaby