March 11, 2010 Pandora's Radio Head By Sarah McBride WSJ. MAGAZINE Peter Yang
The Minneapolis-born Tim Westergren, 44, founded Pandora in 2000 after studying computer acoustics at Stanford and working as a pianist and composer. Tim Westergren has revolutionized the way we listen to music with Internet radio site Pandora.com. By mapping the DNA of the songs we love, he can predict others we'll like too, allowing us to create our own personalized radio station Silicon Valley isn't where you come to get a social conscience. You can safely be a maniacal startup person who has taken a completely irrational bet. They give up their health, their money, everything to chase some kind of technological breakthrough. But it's very insulated. The business of radio is to get you to want to listen to, and only listen to, the music they play. It's natural. That's what they have to do to stay in business. The pop music world is about convincing people that's how you belong, that's how you are cool. People are insecure about their musical taste because of the music industry. The broadcast world is essentially a one-playlist world. Radio can run only one playlist at a time. The music genome is a collection of the most basic attributes that collectively define a song. Without the right word choice for describing the parts of a song our business wouldn't have worked. We try to break down every dimension of a song to its most basic building blockslike melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, vocal performance. Vocal performance gets probably 30 attributes. Tom Waits is a gravelly baritone, with almost no bravado. Beyoncé, she's an alto with bravado galore. Music shapes your personality. When you're young, music is a huge building block. Part of your identity is finding something you really love and can hold on to. It's not only that it's a soundtrack, it's an exposition of who you are. What makes music so powerful is that it can reconnect you to parts of your personality, parts of your history. We're looking for things that make our life less ordinary. When you're older, it's harder to find new music. You don't have time. The radio isn't playing for you anymoreit's playing for the next generation. People may not like what they're hearing on the radio, but that's very different from saying music today is worse. Keeping people motivated during the two and a half years when we weren't always able to pay salaries was tough. There was a bunch of things that helped. One was our product was cool. People felt we had something really compelling. I did believe in it, deeply. It's very rare to have the kind of Facebook trajectory, where you just blow out of the gates from day one. To be successful as an entrepreneur, you need to be humble enough to know what you don't know. And to know how other people can help you, so that you're generous in your involvement and rewarding of other people. In the future, thousands of artists will dominate sales, not hundreds. There will be a much bigger layer of musicians making a living at their craft, which is not defined by big hits. They'll be taking advantage of things like Pandora and MySpace and Twitter to identify and attract fans. And they're going to become really good at getting those fans to become their patrons. A crowd-sourced version of the patronage model will dominate. This is how music started back when kings and queens would commission composers and orchestras. Previously, the king would give a big chunk of dough to the composer. Now it's 200,000 people giving a couple of bucks each. Licensing is the biggest challenge in the music industry today. The potential of the digital world is being hampered by licensing constraints. Pandora is only allowed to operate in the U.S., which is absurd. These licensing restrictions don't help musicians. More In Rebel Yell Designer Within Reach Ad Man Dave Droga: Pitch Perfect Gallerist David Zwirner on the Art Crash DVF: Mother of Reinvention Lip Service We have this huge royalty burden. Almost 70 percent of our revenue is paid to royalties. In most businesses, as you get bigger, you get advantages of scale. Things get cheaper by the pound, cheaper by the minute. But that's not true in our case. It's the same price. With increasing technology, people will actually go to concerts more than ever. The irony of technology is you become on one hand more connected, on the other hand more disconnected. People are going to yearn for that real, live human engagement. Ben Folds is squarely in the middle of my musical genome. He's a piano player for one. He's a really good songwriter and a great master of melody. He also likes to use a lot of vocal harmony. And he introduces me to a lot of stuff that I've never heard that's similar, like the Gabe Dixon Band, Ben Kweller, Jack's Mannequin. I'm the guy who's actually distracted by Muzak. I almost never tune music out. I try to figure out the underlying song but then I listen to the instrumentation, and I imagine the musicians playing it. They have these absolute topdrawer musicians come in and record these things. It's a professional production. Beck was a hard artist to classify. His musical vocabulary is outside the musical expression. It's different. We don't quite have the elements to capture it. We don't do a very good job with him. People crave simplicity. We're used to complexity and it's tiring and it's burdensome. Google beat out every other search engine because it was simple. Even Apple. Those guys make it seem like the products are toys. Music is at the cutting edge of cultures getting more and more intermixed. It's an evolution along many, many years. Technology and transportation have accelerated that for sure. People are building software to allow remote multitrack recording across the world. Someone once showed me a copy of a prescription slip. It just said, "Pandora. Listen to Pandora." It's used in therapy, meditation and in massage. It was an answer to a "Jeopardy!" question a little while ago. That's the cultural finishing line. Music is a tremendously powerful medium. I was in a Pandora town-hall meeting in New York. Near the end, this fellow got up. He had lost his hearing about eight years ago and was reading our lips while we were talking. He said Pandora had changed his life. As a song starts playing, he finds the lyrics, puts them up on the screen, puts his hands on the speakers and feels the music pulse through his body. People there were spellbound. I was choked up. That night, I couldn't sleep. Edited from Sarah McBride's interview with Westergren
