Only in the past year has the name Pandora begun to mean something other than a reference to the mythical woman who released havoc upon mankind. Tim Westergren, founder of the Internet radio experience called Pandora, stopped by Charlottesville last Monday for a town hall meeting to discuss the Pandora he knows best. Hosted by Gravity Lounge (the Downtown Mall's coziest music enclave), the gathering welcomed a crowd of Pandora junkies as well as strangers curious about its grandiose claim.
Pandora now boasts 3.5 million users, an incredible feat considering it opened to the public a mere eight months ago. Launched in 2004 as a preview service for Westergren's friends and family, Pandora reached 5,000 accounts after a week.
"The cat was out of the bag. Our friends weren't supposed to tell anybody" about the service, Westergren said.
Westergren called an emergency meeting, and Pandora went public soon afterward.
Pandora users tune their radio stations by telling the service what songs they like and dislike; they're constantly in control of their station's "musical DNA."
With a previous job as a film composer, Westergren designed Pandora to please people who weren't necessarily musicians.
"They didn't care if there were woodwinds or violin sections," he said. "They just said, 'I like it.'"
This thumbs-up, thumbs-down philosophy originated in the Music Genome Project, the brain behind Pandora. The individual and interactive dialogue between listeners and their streams of music is partly responsible for Pandora's success. Hard labor accounts for the rest of it.
Every song that scrolls across Pandora is classified according to the Music Genome Project, which breaks down one song into upwards of 400 attributes. Westergren painted an image of this process: "Since March 2000, each of our analysts has sat down with a pair of headphones, analyzing one song at a time. It takes 30 minutes to give a song its genes."
For example, voice alone has 40 attributes, ranging from vibrato use to if the artist is using their head or chest voice. Pandora's 45 music analysts mold the genes of 15,000 new songs a month, adding to the 1.5 million songs already available.
Additionally -- as users come to realize when they use Pandora -- the service pays no mind to an artist's label, genre or popularity. Westergren introduced himself as an experienced touring musician, familiar with "plowing the interstates" only to play for tiny audiences that had never heard of him. His "passionate interest in solving that problem" was apparent as he stressed one reason for his "Fall Tour": to stuff his bags with local music. Through a painless submission process, artists that can't catch Westergren personally can send their music to Pandora.
"Everything we get, we listen to," Westergren said. "We don't know if they're cool or not. We're really analyzing the sound."
Pandora is constantly evolving and in true Pandora fashion, is looking to users to define its progress. Last Monday's Charlottesville meet-up was one of the first stops in Westergren's tour across the nation.
Most of the audience's questions centered on Pandora's limitations. Because of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Pandora radio can't skip or repeat a song because it would constitute "song on demand." Westergren reiterated what spoiled Pandora users might forget: The radio industry "wants you to buy CDs. It wants to remain a promotional venue."
In closing, Westergren shared his three hopes for Pandora:
"We're looking forward to mobility." Pandora, though easily accessible on the net, tethers its users to their desktop. Slim Devices Squeezebox now offers a Pandora-connected stereo experience and other mediums are being explored.
Pandora wants to offer "the ability to look in each other's playlists, to share easily, listener-to-listener."
Westergren said he hopes to expand the current features of shared stations and public profile views.
"We're working on going international. We want to reach all of our Beverly Hills listeners."
Pandora asks every user for their zip code to verify residence in the United States -- the only country their license covers. The infamous 90210 zip code is the hometown of an astronomical amount of registered users. It seems the rest of the world wants in on the future of music, too.
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