I’ve been a regular pandora listener for the past 3-4 months. I have a daily habit. Try it out at http://www.pandora.com and get hooked yourself! Pandora is the brainchild of Tim Westergren, who I got to meet today at Seattle’s EMP. Tim knows music, having spent about 10 years as a rock musician, experiencing life on the road firsthand, living out of a van and travelling the west coast playing gigs where he could find them. He also studied computer acoustics at Standford while an undergrad, and spent some time as a movie score composer (or trying to be one that is!)…experiencing the music industry from multiple perspectives. During the discussion today, Tim talked a bit about his background, the history of Pandora and spent quite a long time taking questions from the other pandora listeners who came out to put in their own personal feature requests.
This meetup is one stop on a nationwide roadtrip Tim is making to informally connect with Pandora listeners. Tim mentioned that one of his first stops in New York City a couple months ago included a whopping 2 people meeting him at a cafe. Today in Seattle he packed an auditorium of the EMP with 150 people! Keep in mind, the meetup was only publicized in a single entry on the pandora blog. Each person who attended also got an e-mail reply by Tim himself. What started out as an informal meet and greet tour is turning into one of the best and least expensive marketing campaigns they could have ever imagined!
As background, Pandora came about as a sideproject, with the original idea being the platform Pandora sits on, the Music Genome Project. This project involves categorization of songs by a taxonomy that captures their essential qualities. The key to the taxonomy, is that each of the 400,000 songs (and growing) in the Pandora database are assessed manually by a trained musician. Each assessment takes about 20 minutes and Pandora has now grown to include over 40 musicians helping to grow what they call “The Genome.”
While the original vision for the project was to create the Music Genome and use it to help e/retailers identify music to cross sell to their customers (think Amazon’s referral engine only much much better), an early attempt at creating a webcast service was soo successful that it has now become the primary business. I highly recommend checking it out. Tim’s vision is to utlimately create a “middle class for musicians” by making more obscure/independent artists more apparent to the masses as a result of the Music Genome and the cross-referencing it enables. Think of it this way, if you are a big Police fan, Pandora will play songs that are similar in “spirit”, including more obscure artists you may have never otherwise discovered.
Some other interesting stats thrown about at the meetup:
- Pandora has over 2 million listeners
- Pandora has over 23 million radio stations created by listeners
- Viral from the get-go: the original pandora.com service was opened to 200 friends and family, the website was password protected so only these people could access it. Within a few days, over 5000 people were accessing the service! This was the original sign that streaming audio was really something they should pay attention to!
- 10% of pandora sessions result in someone buying music using the links to purchase on Amazon.com or iTunes! This conversion rate is incredibly high.
- Pandora makes about 5% per purchase their listeners make on Amazon or iTunes.
- Currently about 70% of their indexed songs are from popular artists, 30% are from lesser-known or indepedent musicians.
- Currently about 70% of incoming songs they are in the process of indexing are from lesser-known or independent musicians!
- 400K songs are currently indexed as part of the music genome project….this is growing every day
- Pandora is funded through a cut of purchased songs, advertisements on their homepage, and use of their Music Genome Project platform by eTailers (Amazon was specifically mentioned) to help cross sell music to their shoppers.
- They currently have 70 employees, and are growing!
- During the dot-com-bust they had to stop paying salaries to keep the business going (they have since made up for that!)
I love Pandora because it plays great music, and helps me discover bands I otherwise would have never known existed. Is there really any better feeling than discovering a cool new song or band? After hearing Tim speak, it is also inspiring to see these guys stick it through for over 6 years since founding the company, pushing through 1) the dot com bust and 2) the flood of music related startups (think Napster et al) and coming out on the other side a success.
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Ravi —
Great Post! I’ve already reached out to Tim so that I can interview him about his meetup campaign!
Todd
Awesome. I think entrepeneurs can learn a lot from people like Tim Westergren. You need the endurance and geneuine passion for what you are doing to see through an idea. I don’t know how many experienced business-people or venture capitalists would have stuck with an idea like The Music Genome Project for that long, given the terrible market environment post 2000. Sometimes it is easier for some people to pull-the rip cord and move on to the next big thing than to finish what they started. The folks at Pandora are definitely not like that!
let me know when the you get the interview wrapped up. would love to hear it!