h Magazine's hmonthly.com

Tim Westergren Opens Pandora’s Box

Posted on 05. Nov, 2008 by Administrator in Music, Profiles

words by Devoe Yates

Finding good new music can be a challenging task.  Unless you have the bona fide recommendation of a trusted friend, you might find yourself on a time consuming and fruitless journey, enduring the hardly-telling process of previewing songs on iTunes or venturing into the amorphous and disappointing netherworld of MySpace music. There’s always Internet radio, but the problem there is that someone else is always picking the music for you.  But finding new music doesn’t have to be so disheartening thanks to Tim Westergren, the creator of Pandora.com. 

    Pandora is interactive radio in its basic description, and it’s even available on the iPhone now. The beauty of Pandora is that you can type in the name of a band or a song that you like, and it’ll create a custom playlist just for you.  That playlist will be filled to the brim with music similar in sound to the band or song you’ve chosen, and most of it from artists you’ve never heard of before. 

    Behind Pandora are a legion of music experts based in Oakland, CA, 130 at present to be exact, analyzing each and every song they add with over 400 different musical attributes combined into nearly 2,000 focus traits including rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies, and instrumental proficiency. Each song is decoded as if it were a piece of human DNA and then cross referenced with other songs that share similar genetic make-up. As soullessly scientific as it sounds, the process works wonders. Go to Pandora and punch in Justice or D.A.N.C.E for instance, and you’ll get a day long catalog of similar butt-gyrating jams.   So, it’s a bit of music magic that’s free, easy, and mind-broadening. We recently sat down with the father of Pandora, Tim Westergren, as he enjoyed a perfect fall day in Central Park in New York. Tim spends a great deal of time on the road, conducting town halls across the country, gathering ideas from his listeners and factoring them into the workings of Pandora. He’s currently in New York to give a presentation at a Mac Store in SoHo and is taking a moment to enjoy a rare moment of solace by laying back in the green grass and enjoying a cool breeze. Here he enlightens us as to the creation of Pandora, what makes it tick, and where it’s headed. 

h: What’s your musical background? 

Tim Westergren: Music has been the center of my life since I was pretty young, but in college I played in bands and did that whole thing for about seven or eight years. Eventually I moved into film composing around 30-ish. I went cold turkey with making music for awhile when I started the company, I just couldn’t keep it up. I kinda needed a break really, I was a little bit burnt on it, I’d been playing music for a long time. It’s a tough career. 

h: How did Pandora begin? 

TW: Well, when I first started the company with some friends in 2000, it wasn’t originally intended to be a radio site. It was going to be a technology that we were going to license to other companies as a recommendation tool. If you were a music retailer or portal of some kind, it would help your customers navigate catalogs, get recommendations, and discover music. We chased that business model for, gosh, four years. 

h: So when did you change your business model? 

TW: In March 2004, after four and a half years of basic starvation, we raised a big round of financing and that’s when we re-envisioned the company and re-purposed all the stuff we had done into a radio format. We named ourselves Pandora and launched that in November of ’05, so it became sort of a free public Internet radio site. Our mission is pretty simple, to be the world’s largest radio station in every country, playing a massive amount of musical diversity, just redrawing the whole field of radio. 

h: You’re constantly reworking the site and improving it with the help of your users. How does that process work? 

TW: We decided when we launched that we were going to really embrace opportunities to talk to people – we said that we were going to respond individually to every single e-mail, phone call, you name it. If a listener has an idea, we listen and communicate with them about it. It’s a combination of having them feel like they are participating and also having a voice. 

h: How has being on the iPhone affected Pandora? 

TW: It’s just incredible what it did. We got 1.5 million people on Pandora in just three months. It’s doubled our growth pace. The iPhone is the first time we’ve been able to offer Pandora for free on a mobile device. The cool thing is that not only are people using it a lot, they log around 75 minutes a day, and they’re also using it a lot in their car. People are really coddling to the idea of it being a mobile device. 

h: How many songs do you guys have in your library now? 

TW: A little over half a million. 

h: How often do you add songs to Pandora? 

TW: We add about between 12,000 and 15,000 songs a month. 

h: How do you go about picking the songs you’re going to add? 

TW: Everything is eligible, and so that ranges from the latest releases from the big record companies to homemade CDs coming from people’s living rooms. We get a good flow of music that’s just submitted, but we also do a lot of our own research. We get everything off of every chart – every billboard chart, college chart, everything. We’re always browsing online and looking at every possible resource from independent distributors to music forums and community sites. The one big advantage is that it’s not dependent on popularity. If you’re a completely independent band, and even though no one knows you, no one has ever bought your album, and no one has a history of who you are, we can still be really good at putting you in front of the right people. Pandora’s not really a “Hip Artist” centered business, we’re really more about working musicians. 

h: Do you feel that a lot of bands have had more success because of Pandora? 

TW: Yeah, I know for sure that we’re driving fans to bands all the time. We have a lot of bands who write in to us and say, ‘Hey, we’ve suddenly started selling a lot of music on iTunes and it coincides with when we were added to Pandora.’ That’s the most satisfying part of all of this, getting people’s music out there. 

h: You have a good amount of employees analyzing music all the time. Do they ever get tired of listening to music? 

TW: Well, you can’t do a job like that full time (laughs). The hard-core ones maybe do 25 to 30 hours per week but most people do around 20 hours. 

h: Are they all musicians pretty much? 

TW: Yeah, they’re all just like I was, playing in bands. They’re all well-trained, you can’t do this work unless you have a really good grounding in theory. They typically have a four year degree in music or composition. 

h: Is the Pandora office a fun musical place? 

TW: It’s not loud. You don’t walk in and hear tons of music because everyone’s on headphones, but there is music everywhere. 

h: Is there a space there where people can just go and jam out? 

TW: Yeah, we have an area that’s called The Backstage, it’s a lounge with drums and guitars set up. So you can go back there and there’ll be people jamming. It’s cool. 

h: What playlists on Pandora have you been listening to recently? 

TW: I jump around quite a bit – Ben Folds is generating some good playlists for me. Oscar Peterson. Elvis Costello. I found a band called The Gabe Dixon Band, and I like them quite a bit. I found them from the Ben Folds station and I’ve found lots of cool stuff from making a station for them.

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Tags: Pandora, Tim Westergren