In an interview with Create Digital Music's Peter Kirn, Pandora founder Tim Westergren talks about how the free interactive radio service works (and, in a follow-up interview, addresses Pandora's possible demise due to the disastrous Copyright Royalty Board decision).
On what it's like to work at Pandora: "It’s all manual. So if you’re a musician, you come in the morning andlog in and there’d be a menu of songs that need analyzing, and a shelfof CDs. You’d grab one, and launch into an analysis. What you’d see infront of you is page after page of music genome templates of musicalattributes. And you go through one at a time and score them, close to400 musical attributes, and those represent all the details you couldimagine of songs. When you’re done, you have this big kind offingerprint, and you dump it into the database, and you find out whatit matches to later."
On the potential for international expansion: "We’re [working on adding] classical now. The other thing missing isworld music … so we have some Latin music, Portuguese, but we’rebasically Ameri-centric, English-centric. Eventually we’re going toallow you to search stations for all sorts of things."
On the possibility of Pandora driving a Broadband Instruments Slacker-style interactive radio device: "In the long run, Pandora needs to be mobile and ubiquitous. It can’tjust be when you’re at your computer. It’s got to connect throughstereo systems, when you’re walking, when you’re in a car — just likeregular radio is. All those things are fair game for us. Mobility I would call our #1 priority right now."
(image from houstonist)
