Thank you Tim, for taking time to reveal some of the ‘Wizard’ behind the scenes of the magical Oz known as Pandora! (The interview occurred by telephone while Tim was driving around Athens, Georgia en route to a meet-up with Pandora listeners)

June: Please describe in your own words what Pandora is about

Tim: Pandora is about making it very easy for someone to listen to, enjoy and discover great music. The key there is that it's very easy and you discover a lot of great music with it.

June: I’ve just been using Pandora for just a couple months and it’s expanded my music interests incredibly. You do indeed make it very easy.

Tim: That’s good. That’s really a big objective. You’re not alone in that. A lot of folks are finding new stuff. That’s entirely what we are trying to do.

June: It’s not what I say I think I like too. I like that about it. It plays what I like but didn’t know it.
What new features can we expect coming up?

Tim: I think one of the things that we are most excited about the pending inclusion of Latin music.

June: That really opens a lot of new doors.

Tim: That’s really just the beginning. Our objective with the Music Genome project is to make a real universal collection so that it encompasses many different languages & cultures and can even help people jump across cultures.

June: Ahhh! That’s interesting, so if you’re listening to one type of music, another type of music from a different culture that has the same qualities might start popping on?

Tim: When we analyze music we don’t actually bucket music into any kind of arbitrary genres or arbitrary boundaries. So if we have a rock band from Japan that sounds like Counting Crows then you’re going to hear it.

June: In setting up this interview, I came to realize you travel quite a bit! What are your travels about? Are you expanding the scope of Pandora?

Tim: I’m doing a bunch of things. I’m first meeting with Pandora listeners. We have meet-ups wherever I go. I had one last night in Atlanta, we are having one tonight in Athens, where we post an invitation for people to sit down with me & just talk about music & Pandora and what they like and don’t like to get firsthand feedback from people. Interacting with Pandora listeners from all over the place becomes a great information gathering opportunity for us. Wherever I am, that’s part of the anthropological research that informs the Music Genome project growth.

June: So the Music Genome project, was that created for the purpose of creating this type of radio or was it created for another purpose?

Tim: No, I had no idea what it would become.

June: What was the birth of the Genome project, what was the goal of that?

Tim: Originally I thought it was going to be just a recommendation tool. That sites would use it to sell music so if you’re a music retailer that someone could be shopping on your site for music we would be really good at recommending other albums or artists that you should buy based on what you were purchasing. It would be a recommendation service. We actually pursued that business for quite awhile.

June: So how did it meander its path to Pandora?

Tim: Umm…quite circuitously. Our initial plan was to license it to places. We licensed it to AOL, Tower Records & Border & Barnes & Nobles and Best Buy. We were sort of building an interesting but small business model based on that. Then we moved into the retail space for Best Buy we did some in store kiosks for them, but what happened was that it wasn’t turning out to be a very healthy business for us. It’s very hard to make a profitable business when you’re beholden to a small number of very large customers. We kind of chased that for a while and then we were struggling as a business. We were out of money, trying to get financing and we really had our heads down in the weeds. Then in 2004 we were able to raise a round of venture financing and what that allowed us to do was stop and take a breath for a second and consider where should we really be taking this thing. What happed in those intervening years were pretty significant things. Broadband had become a much more ubiquitous phenomenon. Music on the Internet requires a nice healthy amount of pipe and doesn’t work so well on dial-up. Once that had flipped over & broadband had become much more ubiquitous online audio suddenly looked much more like a mass-market product than it had before. What also happened was a sort of clearing up of the licensing landscape. For a long time there was a lot of uncertainty about what licenses were going to look like from the record companies for online web casters. That had kind of cleared up so we knew what we were getting into. So lo and behold, the thing we had built in all of that time, the Music Genome was perfectly suited to be applied to the task of building great playlists. So we went for it.

June: One step suggested the next step, it sound like.

Tim: Right the path kind of revealed itself to us in a way.

June: Sort of like Pandora!

Tim: Exactly, but it took a lot longer.

June: The Pandora space is just so friendly and intuitive. It’s not so much what you say you like or even think you like it lets the music & your guys (Pandora’s) research create & direct what you hear. Its feels so relaxed and intuitive. Is that by design?

Tim: Oh yeah, absolutely. One of our mantras when we did his project was that the interface would be simple. The problem that we thought needed solving was that you needed something that would make it easy, quick and painless for people. We were determined to master to that objective. That’s what we were all about. Can you hang on for one second?

Tim asking stranger on the street from his car: Hey, can you help me? I’m looking for the Blind Pig Tavern!

Stranger: Right across the street

Tim: And is there a record store there too?

Stranger: Record store?

Tim: The best independent record store in town. Mixed Lots or Mix up or…??

Stranger: Umm…well there’s One Street Records downtown.

Tim: That’s it!!

Stranger: One Street Records its close about a mile down Thomas. You’ll have to find somewhere to park and it’s in the middle of downtown.

Tim: Sorry about that June!

June: No that was great, you’re in the street. Looking for The Blind Pig Tavern? Now we know you’re out there doing the work yourself. That’s proof your not just sitting in your office saying “Oh yeah…we talk to people all the time! So, Back to the interview!

June: I’ve read that you have 30 people analyzing music.

Tim: We have 40 now.

June: 40 now, but still analyzing all the music in the world. When I do the math it just seems to be impossible.

Tim: It is impossible to analyze all the music in the world and we knew that. We had a choice, which was, you can build a system that can handle millions of songs and do it very quickly and be very scalable. But to do that you have to take shortcuts. You can’t do it in the deliberate detailed way that we are or you can do it deliberately and with detail and not you cannot get the same amount.

Our theory is that when it comes to music the problem that needs to be solved is not to make 15 million songs easy to navigate but to make the smaller subset of the best music phenomenally easy to navigate. In North America there are about 5 million songs in some form of commercial existence and we have about 400,000 of them so let’s say we have about 10% of that for arguments sake. I think most people you ask about Pandora they would say it has a massive catalog just from using it. It’s kind of hard to stump it.

I think that tells you that our theory is right. In reality the amount of music that enters the public consciousness and the amount of music you need to give people all of their starting points & allow a big amount of discovery is not as big as people think. Once you have a couple million people using the service they can guide you.

June: Is there a Pandora Music Festival or Pandora label on the horizon?

Tim: I would love to put on a festival, but I don’t imagine us becoming a label. We don’t want to be in a position where there’s the perception among our listeners that we have a bias towards a particular catalog. I think trust these days is very difficult to get, very easy to lose.

June: How is co-founding a new company like giving birth?

Tim: Not a bad comparison. Well it’s grueling, certainly. Physically, mentally it’s extremely demanding and it takes an extreme amount of tenacity to see a company all the way through. You have to be very resourceful & very tough. People ask me what are the most important attributes to have or what makes for a successful start-up. I think tenacity is the most important part of that. You have to will your company to succeed. I think one way it does resemble childbirth is that you need a partner. I think that anyone wanting to launch it company is well advised to found it with somebody. It’s very hard to go through the life cycle of a startup without someone to share your burdens, your worries. My first piece of advice to someone starting a company is don’t do it alone.

June: That’s a good point. A lot of times we see the finished product and think you just woke up some day and magically it just fell into place. Never seeing what went into it.

Tim: I guess you also go through a lot of change. You go through these changes & you have to be very adaptive & willing to embrace change.

June: And then when it’s born you have your child with a mind of it own to deal with. You can’t just walk away from it.

Tim: Then it learns to crawl & that’s all she wrote!



-June Caldwell
 

June Caldwell lives amidst drawers stuffed with an array of earplugs, clipped wristbands, and notes scrawled on ticket stubs… splitting her time between concert reviews, and doing radio airplay promotions for Indie bands at Bryan Farrish Radio Promotions. She covers the LA music scene for artrocker.com, the largest bi-weekly new music publication in the UK, and www.fly.co.uk with her shutterbug hubby Roger.

June’s always interested in Indie bands looking for promotion, and can be contacted at: junejer@gmail.com.