The NY Times' Jeff Leeds has an article today about "how technology is shaking up the hierarchy of tastemakers across popular culture." It's been written before, but Leeds concentrates on music recommendation services, playlists and online radio -- not blogs and Pitchfork.

The beginning of the article reminds me of a similar article about Epitonic.com in the late '90s as the company was burning through money. The company employed music buffs to input data about each band into the download service's database. (It was a kind of "Revenge of the Nerds" article that was so popular before the bubble broke.) Here, Pandora, which is not yet profitable, is using professional musicians to categorize music by their characteristics.

Most interesting yet unsubstantiated item in the article: Pandora founder Tim Westergren claims ten percent of the time Pandora users click through to buy a song or album on iTunes or Amazon.com. That's a heck of a conversion rate.

[music jobs] Director of Content at Dada Entertainment; New York, NY.