In 1999, Tim Westergren was an eager film composer who stumbled upon a powerful analogue. While analyzing the composition of music to put into films, he wondered if music had its own genome. In 2000, Westergren started Pandora, a website that allows users to enter an artist, song, or album and get a virtual radio station which plays music based on the inherent qualities of the artist they selected.
Like human genetics, Pandora isolated different loci for different songs: if you entered Pavement, you would get lo-fi, mid tempo, pensive songs; if you entered Metallica, you would get compressed guitars, scathing vocals, and fast tempos from a collection of artists. As cool as that sounds, Pandora wasn't always a hot ticket, to investors or users. Pandora struggled until 2004, when Larry Marcus, a venture capitalist, threw 9 million into the venture.
Today, Pandora has 700,000 songs, and it selects artists based on 400 musical traits. Pandora created an iphone app in 2008 to allow people to stream music- and announced a deal with Ford in January to put Pandora in their cars. Some criticize the service for failing to consider culture associations in music. For example, a user who creates a Bright Eyes station could theoretically get bands that are isolated from Bright Eyes' time or culture. Even so, many in the industry see Pandora as an evolution, and a bridge to the future. Russ Crupnick, senior industry analyst for entertainment at the NPD Group, noted online radio drives a 41 percent increase in legitimate downloads. Westergren sees the future of
Pandora in creating a service that alerts listeners, based on their location, if a band on their Pandora station will be playing a show in their area. Now that CD sales are down, concert revenue is increasingly being relied upon by bands to put food on the table. In the interim, Pandora will keep putting new music on listeners tables, which conventional FM radio forgot about long ago.
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