For many, getting paid to sit and listen to music is a dream job. But for about 40 employees of Pandora, it’s a reality. They sit, they listen and they categorize every song they hear so that listeners of the online radio station (part of the Music Genome Project), can tune in and get turned on to new music.

For a $3-per-month subscription (or for free, if you don’t mind Web ads while you listen), you can create your own stations from music you like, and Pandora’s large database of similar musical attributes spits out a similar-sounding artist for.

While the “unknown” artists are subjectively chosen, it’s still a pretty cool way to hear new music. And that’s the best part: you hear the music beyond the recommended band names.

I spoke with Tim Westergren, founder of the Music Genome Project and Pandora, and asked him a few questions.

Harmonium: First of all, how did you get the idea for Pandora?

Westergren: Well, I’m a musician, so I’ve been playing music for a long time and I spent many years playing in bands, and in the course of that became very intimately familiar with the challenges of being an independent artist and became very interested in how to solve that problem. You have musicians out there who have no way of finding their audience essentially. Partly as a musician, and also as a film composer, I spend really a lot of time thinking about music tastes and you know what people like about music, how to understand why they like what they like. And in my capacity of a film composer that happened when I tried to figure out what a film director liked. Because, I was trying to write a piece of music that they would like based on essentially just songs I knew they liked. So I had to kind of turn those song preferences into a new composition, and that meant thinking in musicological terms. So when they say “I like these four songs,” I just say to myself, “What does that mean musically?”

So I kind of had that genome idea in my head. I was living in the Bay area in the late ’90s and online music was really … it was in its first wave. And the idea came to me that if I could create some kind of an interface over the Web that would allow someone to type in a song and get recommendations for others that sound similar could be a great way for people to discover music.

Harmonium: You got started originally with the genome project?

Westergren: (agrees)

Harmonium: How did you do that? Was it basically you just categorizing everything?

Westergren: Well, the first thing was to create the taxonomy itself. Like, what were the attributes? What were the, we call them, genes, that collectively would be our template. And I kind of created the first one and pretty quickly got some help from some musicians that I knew. And we created it from scratch, basically, kind of on the white board and built it up piece by piece.

Harmonium: What were some of the first genes that you had?

Westergren: Um, probably the very very first one we had was tempo. That’s the most fundamental gene of music. But, uh, I don’t remember the actual … we took sort of each segment of music, you know, melody, harmony, rhythm, form, instrumentation, vocal performance etc. and sort of one-by-one broke them each down into their basic building blocks.

Harmonium: Now, who all did you get help with on this? Was it just fellow musicians, or did you go to a university setting?

Westergren: Well there were a number of sort of active musicians who I consulted. But my principle partner on that was a fellow named Nolan Gasser. He’s a musicology Ph.D. and … he actually became kind of the head of the music genome operation.

Harmonium: And when was this? You said it was in the ’90s?

Westergren: We launched the company at the very end of 1999. December of 1999.

Harmonium: Now, how did it transform from the genome project to the web site Pandora?

Westergren: Well, it took about 5 years before we decided to go in that direction. And what happened was, we had been pursuing … we had been building the Music Genome Project and actually providing it as a licensed technology to other companies, like a recommendation engine. And in 2004, over the course of a couple of years, there was a pretty big shift, I think driven primarily by the adoption of broadband, to where online radio was becoming kind of a big deal, something that everybody was using. And so we had something of a kind of reorganization at the beginning of 2004 and sort of identified online radio as the perfect application for everything we had been doing.

Harmonium: How did it translate from that into Pandora?

Westergren: It took us about a year in the very beginning to build the very basic, what we call, a matching engine, which was the whole software part of taking this music analysis and turning it into a recommendation. … and Pandora itself, the application took about a year, also, to develop, built on top of all that preexisting work.

Harmonium: How do you get the database?

Westergren: If you came to our offices right now, you’d see about 40 musicians sitting at their desks, headphones on, listening to songs. And they take each song, one at a time, and they describe it along close to 400 musical attributes for each song. So it can take as much as 30-35 minutes to do a single tune.

Harmonium: What is the future of the genome project? Where do you see it going?

Westergren: I hope that Pandora becomes a very, very large radio with a huge number of people listening to it. And I hope that we not only bring a lot of people back into music and music discovery and reinvigorate listeners who have become disconnected to it, but that we also help create a musician’s middle class.

Harmonium: Can you explain that a little bit more?

Westergren: So Pandora chooses the songs that it plays not based on popularity — it’s on musical similarity. What that means is, as you listen, you hear a lot of music you’ve never heard before. And most of those musicians are kind of like what I used to be — they’re in bands playing around with no sort of public voice. And Pandora is just this unique method of surfacing all of those musicians that, otherwise, you’d never hear of. So it’s a great way to promote a much broader and deeper collection of music.

Harmonium: Have you heard of any success stories of bands that people heard through Pandora because they were looking for something that sounded like something else, and this band got a break because of Pandora?

Westergren: I get a lot of e-mails from musicians saying that their iTunes sales have gone way up ever since they were in the genome. And artists who say people are showing up at their shows because they heard about the band on Pandora, so we’re beginning to get that, yeah.

Harmonium: What do you have in store? Is there anything up your sleeve for 2007?

Westergren: Well, there’s lots of different things we’re working on. We’re working on mobility — where you can listen to Pandora on the go. We’re working on international growth, we’re trying to spread Pandora outside the U.S., and also add a lot more international music to the collection. And we’re also doing a little bit more work on the listener-to-listener part of Pandora, allowing people to talk to each other … and share favorites and discoveries and so on.

Harmonium: Do you think Pandora’s going to be the future of music, or where do you think digital music is headed?

Westergren: I think we have a big role to play, absolutely. And I think that more and more each passing day because our listenership is growing so fast. I think in the future, the music business is going to be about a lot more artists. More artists are going to have access to audiences than before. I think that’s one of the big contributions that digital music is going to make and that I think we, in particular, will facilitate.

Harmonium: What would be the ultimate realization for Pandora and the Music Genome Project?

Westergren: The ultimate service for Pandora is to listen wherever you are, so you can listen to it on your computer or on a connected device that you take with you and that’s sort of always connected. And if you like something, you can very instantly and easily buy it, then that music gets added to your collection. You can listen to that on Pandora on demand, you know, so it becomes part of an interactive listening experience. And then, of course, as a result of being much more broadly used, we really have an impact for every artist that gets into the genome.

Interview Excerpt (MP3): Tim Westergren on the future of music

-- Seán O’Donnell

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