Interview with Tim Westergren of Pandora
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“Pandora”:http://www.pandora.com is a personalized radio service that allows someone to easily create a radio station that plays music they like. It accomplishes this by using the music genome project – an enormous taxomy of music. Tim is a musician with experience in rock bands and film composing. He and two co-founders started the music genome project seven years ago. |
How did Pandora get started? What was the atmosphere like when you were launching?
To give you some background, I came from rock bands and film composing – I had been trying to make a living as a musician for ten years before we started the music genome project. While composing scores for films, I would sit down with each film’s director and we would go back and forth playing music for each other to see if we could constitute a musical taste.
Two experiences came together to generate the idea for the music genome project. First – while I was in the band, I learned that finding an audience is the biggest problem facing indie musicians. And second – when I was composing film scores, I realized that there was no way to formally categorize someone’s musical taste.
So two co-founders and I decided to tackle those problems by starting the music genome project. Unfortunately, we started the company just a few weeks before the dot com collapse. It was a rocky journey – the money we had raised for the project lasted us about a year. After that, we were broke for three years and couldn’t raise any money; the music business was in chaos. After facing eviction notices, we finally got some real money in 2004 and that’s when we started Pandora.
So basically there were two distinct chapters: everything before 2004 was really about survival whereas now it’s the entirely opposite experience – we’ve had several rounds of funding and gained five million users without advertising our service anywhere.
How does Pandora manage to stay on top of the newest music?
Keeping up with the music industry’s evolution is a substantial operation. We get music from a lot of different places but the single largest source is the thousands of recommendations that we receive from our listeners. We also have a huge catalog of music sent to us from bands, managers, and music labels. Also, Pandora employs two people full-time to turn over every stone and find the newest music.
Where do you find your musically talented team?
Our team of trained musicians all have four-year degrees in music. They’re all practicing musicians with a deep grounding in music theory. They are playing music all the time and many are music teachers.
We have 45 musicians looking at songs in hundreds of musical dimensions each day in order to reach our goal of analyzing 15,000 songs every month.
What are your thoughts on the short audio commercials that Pandora has recently introduced?
Right now we’re just running a test to see how the commercials will be received. We have heard a fair number of complaints but we wanted to try it out to see how we could optimize the business aspect of the site while maintaining the integrity of the listening experience. We’re testing a once-a-day ad that goes out to ten percent of listeners, but the jury is still out on whether we’ll use audio commercials at all.
Bonus: Pandora is a pretty loaded name…how did you decide what to call the site?
Pandora is known for her curiosity and her box full of surprises, but she was also a gifted musician. Even though her box didn’t let out the most desirable things, hope was at the bottom. When we thought about her story, it just felt like us – full of surprises and for the curious.
Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal