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Imagine a radio station playing just the songs you like, and giving you the ability to tell when a song doesn’t fit your tastes and not playing it anymore. That is what Pandora does.

Pandora is a web based service that allows you to create your own music stations. Stations that “learn” what kind of music you prefer based on the choices you make. Pandora only needs a web browser with the Flash player plugin installed, that is almost any computer in the world.

Pandora rewards our curiosity, hence the name. It’s a great way of finding new music. No matter if it’s the latest hit by a mainstream artist or an unknown local band from Biloxi, Mississippi.

I signed up to Pandora a couple of months ago and I instantly loved it; thus, when I got a newsletter written by Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora and who started the Music Genome Project in 1999, I decided to ask him for an interview.

Tim replied quickly and we had a talk over the phone yesterday.

Here you have it, Tim Westergren from Pandora, at Ventanazul.

AB: How did you come with the concept of Pandora and the Music Genome Project? Now it sounds logical to think of the characteristics of music as genes, music as DNA. How did you come with this idea of using the word genome for the project?

TW: Let’s see. Our idea behind the music genome … our idea behind the company, was to find a way to create a universal template, some kind of a universal set of attributes, that could describe a really broad range of music, as much like primary colors, that you can make any color from three colors, that was really the whole idea behind the genome idea.

The idea was to create some baseline that could describe everything That’s the same thing the Human Genome Project did. The Human Genome Project is meant to identify all of the elements that define, for example, if a person is 7′ 2” or 3′ 4”; black, brown or white; has green eyes or blue eyes; runs fast or run slow; etc. It’s just the same idea. These are the building blocks.

AB: The human genome, if I’m right, uses four basic elements, and you have around four hundred basic elements to catalog your music. Am I right?

TW: That’s correct.

AB: I’ve been reading about this “music buyer” you have at Pandora, Michael Zapruder …

TW: Sure.

AB: I laughed when I read he was formerly known as Analyst #26.

TW: That’s right.

AB: How many analysts do you have right now at Pandora?

TW: Thirty-six.

AB: How is one day at Pandora? I know all your analysts have a background in music theory, most of them have bands, are musicians … Do they work full time listening to music? How is a day at Pandora analyzing music?

TW: The typical analyst would spend four to five hours in one shot listening to music. That’s about how long you can do it before your ears start to itch. So, it’s not a full time job, and in fact they don’t really want full time jobs because they are all working on their music careers.

AB: I see. I understand you play the piano, you are a musician and you’ve been producing music for films too.

TW: Yeah, that’s right.

AB: What do you think about providing music that empathizes with different kind of people?. Let’s say, when I am working in graphics designing there is some kind of music that I have to listen to get into a “creative mood”, for example, I love the music of Sigur Ros, these guys from Iceland.

TW: Yes, I like Sigur Ros too. They are great.

AB: And I listen to a different kind music when I’m doing something else, like programming. With the Music Genome Project you are reaching many kinds of people, people that don’t know they may have something in common with others listening to the same music. You mentioned an example of a guy listening, and enjoying, the same music as his dad’s. What can you tell me about your experience with people finding music for the good of music, and not because of the artist or how popular it is or any other stuff?

TW: Definitely I’ve seen a lot of that. Because Pandora is explicitly just about the sound of the music, it challenges people to think a little bit different about what they are listening.

A lot of musical taste hearing is driven by popularity, what a band looks like, what certain people say about them, who they are seen with, and that sort of public image. Pandora kind of ignores all that, and when we recommend a musician, a song, we have no idea how popular the artist is, or how old they are, or how they look like, or whether they are cool or not. So I do think that it causes people to think twice about what is driving their musical taste.

AB: Do you use in anyway the information that you get from the music your users are listening at Pandora?

TW: We don’t yet, but we certainly plan to use anything that will make stations better. I think there is value in looking at how large audiences react to the songs being played. I know it makes sense that if everytime someone launches a station based on Sigur Ros, and when they get played a song by Moby they thumb it down we can probably say: “maybe we were wrong about that one”, and let that one become a kind of a feedback loop into the system. So, we don’t use any of that feedback information right now but I think it makes sense to eventually do it.

AB: I read something that I really liked in Pandora’s blog, it was written by Tom Conrad, who I understand worked with Apple in the Mac OS interface. Tom wrote: “we created something that lets you use your ears, not your mouse, to discover new music.” The user experience of your site is great, I think one good thing about usability is when you don’t notice it is there, you just use the thing, and Pandora is good at this. Pandora is about listening and not clicking or finding or searching. How did you come with the interface for Pandora?

TW: Well, there are several people that have been instrumental in the user experience. Tom Conrad certainly has overseen the whole process. That’s the real expertise of his. He has also worked with two other folks: Dan Lythcott-Haims, who is the Creative Director, and Neil Mix, another engineer and user interface designer. The three of them collectively have created this experience and I’d say that Dan has certainly a big part in the look of the site.

They did a bunch of tests to small audiences, kind of usability tests. We had a dozen people use the service and then we watched them. We did that a number of times before putting it out to a lot of people, and then of course, once it went out to a lot of people, we had tons of feedback.

AB: Tell me a little about your tour around the United States, I’ve read that you have been in Mississippi and you have been witness to the Katrina effects. How is your trip going, what kind of people are you meeting with, how much music are you discovering for Pandora?

TW: There are a lot of things that are happening with that trip. Certainly I’m finding lots of music, tons and tons of music. I come home with bags full of music, as well as long lists of artists that we should be looking at. I am also meeting many people in the many many music scenes that I visit, who are kind of long standing members of the music community, those could be local DJ’s, people who own small local record stores, managers or bookers.

What is really happening is that we are connecting to a whole network of music lovers and music aficionados, who can help us, on an ongoing basis, to stay in touch with the local music that is being created from all these different places.

Anyway, it’s really a trip that is helping to inform us as we look at building the genome as much as we can.

AB: Have you noticed an explosion of users since you launched Pandora in November 2005?

TW: We launched the version we have right now in November, and yes, it’s exploded. We’ve had in just four and a half months over fifteen million stations that have been created.

AB: I read an article at the NY Times about Pandora, and also about this gizmo that I really liked: the Squeezebox, to listen to your music away from your computer. What are your plans regarding Squeezebox and other mobile devices connected to Pandora?

TW: Mobility is a big priority for us. We definitely want to make Pandora available when you’re not sitting at your computer. Whether is on a device from a home network, or it’s on a phone or an MP3 player. That’s a big priority for us and we are doing a lot of work there.

AB: What do record companies are thinking about you? I understand you are having good conversations with them and they are not perceived as the “evil empire” by you. What do they think about your service? Do they want to contribute in any way with the idea or just providing with music from their catalogs? How are they working with you?

TW: Oh, they are very supportive. We get a lot of music from record companies sent directly to us now. They want us to have all their music on Pandora. They are very supportive.

AB: You have a very restrict policy regarding skipping songs to avoid providing music on demand. Could you talk about that?

TW: We have to abide by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is the DMCA, a law that was passed to provide an structure to web casters. It allows us to play any music that we want and pay a fixed per royalty rate provided that we don’t do certain things.

AB: You link songs to Amazon and iTunes, how well are you selling music through them?

TW: Oh yeah, we are selling a huge amount. Ten percent of the sessions will result in somebody buying something.

AB: That’s great to know. I know this is a long term plan, you started with the project in 1999, it’s almost seven years now. I guess you have a plan for several years ahead, can you tell me a little about the future at Pandora?

TW: Our long term objective as a company is to build a radio service that is the best listening experience anytime and anywhere, and that includes mobility and also includes around the world, so that is available in every country and with music from every language and that the genome is a really comprehensive collection that covers all genres and all the languages and cultures. It’s really a life long pursuit that it will really never end. So, I hope that some years from now, people will look back and people will be using Pandora whenever they want to listen to music.

It will be a source of music discovery and music enjoyment that will transform the relationship people have with music.

AB: Discovering a new band and music is a fantastic experience. When I discovered Sigur Ros some years ago, it was like “wow!”, who would think that a band from Iceland, so far away, would be so great.

Are you going to be on tour all this year? When is it going to end?

TW: You never end! I’ll keep going to different places. I won’t be out on tour all the time, but I’ll never stop these visits.

AB: Nice, that sounds like a wonderful job!

TW: It’s great fun. It’s exhausting, but it’s really inspiring.

AB: I’m going to translate this interview to Spanish too. Do you have any message for our Spanish speaking readers?

TW: We are about to push out into Pandora in the next couple of months a big catalog of Spanish speaking music, that’s a big priority for us and something that we are really excited about. So, we welcome suggestions for music that we should be adding, Spanish speaking music from all over, whether it’s salsa, bosanova, tejana. You name it.

AB: I listened to Shakira in Pandora. But only her songs in English.

TW: That’s about to change!

AB: Okay! Well, thank you very much for your time Tim, it’s been a pleasure talking with you. All the best to you and everybody at the Pandora team.

TW: Thank you very much. I appreciate your interest.

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