I first met Etienne Handman online by emailing some questions about Pandora. Pandora is the highly customized online radio experience that allows you to enjoy your ‘personal online DJ’ to create radio stations full of new music matching your musical taste with unbelievable intuitive ease! It’s so good…must be voodoo. I was amazed to get a response back from the COO, and later read feedback from other Pandora users that the response from Pandora was equally personal both by the ‘Genome Project’ generated music for each listener, and the folks making it happen responding to their questions and comments.

I had a chat with Etienne about his role in making the magic work.

June: Etienne, thank you for sharing some of the ‘behind the scenes’ insight into the future of radio!

June: What does being part of Pandora mean to you?

Etienne: Well I started out at university studying math, computer science and music. I wrote a little program to help me with intro and outros tempos, we made tapes and gave them to everybody we knew! We just wanted everybody to share all this great music. At the time we had no idea there would be something to tie this together as a tool. I was a DJ and I was a mathematician, but was not very good at either. I realized I wasn’t going to feed myself doing that. I really wasn’t much better at computers, but I realized I had to do something like that to feed myself. What happened is, here I am now 30 years later at the job I was training myself for all those years and didn’t even know it! It’s everything I love all in one package!

June: What made you decide to go from being a jazz trumpeter and dj to the very corporate environment of being the CIT Officer at E-Loan and the VP of Technology managing the creation of the first financial E-card, the American Express Blue…to the art and music start up business culture of Pandora? What is the commonality between all these environments?

Etienne: Well, Clint Eastwood said ‘a man’s got to know his limitations’. I knew mine as a DJ, but I loved bringing all these people together with music, so I found a way to put all those favorite things together. The common thread is trying to help make people’s lives better with technology. I get to do that for millions of people and it’s something that I love. People have lost touch with what they love about music, and Pandora helps them get it back.

June: Pandora is such a comfortable environment.

Etienne: What you see is what you get. I hope everybody who listens to Pandora finds some music they didn’t know they like or forgot they like.


June: Do you have a goal each day when you come in to work at Pandora?

Etienne: Well you should know I’m sitting here in a T-shirt. You can’t have a lot of goals in a t-shirt! I’m responsible for the quality of what you hear on Pandora. So that starts with the people who listen to the music that comes to Pandora. We listen to thousands of songs each week.

June: Pandora seems so ‘human’, so flowing and artistic, like a DJ doing sets that focus on one quality of the listeners favorite music, and then another.

Etienne: Yes, that’s what DJ’s do.

June: So your stint as a DJ really helps here!

Etienne: I tell you, it’s just like putting those tapes together for my friends in college, I just have a few more friends now! The majority of my day is spent on improving the music experience.

June: I noticed Pandora is very responsive when people email comments. Is that going to continue as Pandora grows?

Etienne: Yes. We have a group dedicated to that. But they are not customer service people, they are music nuts. They are people that are very passionate about music, about discovering music.

June: I love feeling like there is a whole team of experts finding music that I like for reasons I didn’t even know I like it. I like the privateness at the same time.

Then there is the ‘shared experience’ that people talk about, and the comparison to ‘Last FM’ and it’s community. I prefer Pandora, but what about the shared experience that Last FM and traditional radio have more of than Pandora. How do you address that?

Etienne: We have features like sharing stations. The internet is full of great stuff that can be mashed together. Last FM is great. There is no reason to have either/or. People can enjoy any number of music sources. I offered our technology to Last FM to share.

June: Is their feedback to the artists about how many people are listening to them?

Etienne: That is something we are working on.

June: How much does customer input play in determining your direction?

Etienne: The Pandora tuner looks for tunes that have something in common, and putting them together and playing them. The Pandora community is giving millions of thumbs ups and thumbs down to guide the tuner as to how often to play things.

So the Genome decides what songs to play. The Pandora community decides how often to play each song and how to put them together, then the individual Pandora listener further decides what they will hear by their thumbs up and thumbs down.

June: How many listeners do you have?

Etienne: At the end of March we had about 1.8 million, and we have been around for 6 months.

June: Do you advertise?

Etienne: Amazingly no. We started off and invited each employee to invite as many as we want, then each to invite 10, then 25 then we just got rid of the limit since there is such an appetite for it.

Everyone wants to share this. I don’t think it’s about how great Pandora is, it’s about how great the desire is to discover and share music and reconnect with it. I’m sure you know people who used to listen to music everyday, to be excited about new music, and have lost touch. Pandora helps them get back in touch with that. Our listeners are telling each other about this.

June: How do you make money?

Etienne: Well first we have paid advertising, with some pretty big companies. The advertisers are willing to pay a pretty big price because the listeners while they are on the site can do something else while they are listening to the music. Music can fully occupy one part of the brain while the other part is doing something else.

The 2nd source is when people click through to buy the music, it doesn’t cost the listener any more, but we get a commission. Our research shows that people who listen to Pandora buy more music than they were before.

The last way we make money is people can pay $3 a month for a commercial free Pandora. We have a large number of subscribers. Subscribers can have the same experience but without advertisements. When we first launched our service, we only had it for paid subscribers. When we found we could make it work without paid subscribers, we felt offering pretty much the same experience for free wasn’t fair. So we contacted each subscriber and offered them their money back. Amazingly, almost not one wanted the money back. A lot felt like they were investing in something good.

June: So, what is a typical day like working at Pandora?

Etienne: Working here is more like a music lover’s club more than a traditional workplace. There are cds from the floor and covering every wall. There’s a stage here with a drum kit, guitar system, bass, amps, sometimes people just pick up an instrument and start playing!

June: What’s your favorite type of music?

Etienne: Well for the last few weeks I’ve been listening to nothing but Latin music. That’s a new direction we are working on starting, and we don’t want to start it until it is good. I had no idea how much of it I like. So this week that is my favorite type of music. Next week it might be Klesmir music or something, who knows?

June: Thanks so much for your time

Etienne: It was good talking to you!





-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.