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Pandora Town Hall Meeting
Some of you readers out there may recall my previous article about Pandora.com and the interview with Pandora's founder and President, Tim Westergren. If not, you can refresh your brains here.
To recap, Pandora is a free streaming music service that delivers high quality tunes and helps users discover new bands by analyzing their input and spitting out similar artists. Pandora's in-house song analysts use a series of criteria to rank each song thereby grouping the music into quantifiable musical categories, not necessarily based on genre. Enter the music you like and Pandora will guide you to new music you may have never heard of. And the system works pretty well. I've been a Pandora listener for several months and the service has turned me on to many new artists I'd have never found on my own.  So why am I repeating what I said back in May? Well, I recently had a chance to meet with Pandora's President, Tim, and have a sit down, face-to-face type meeting!a rare thing in the world of the internet. Tim spends about half of his time working on Pandora, searching for new music, and refining the service. The other half of Tim's workdays is spent traveling across the U.S. talking to people about Pandora and the future of digital music. He mainly frequents colleges and universities setting up lectures and question and answer sessions with students and townspeople in what he calls town hall meetings. Fortunately, Tim recently set out towards my side of the country from Pandora's home base in San Francisco. A quick once through Virginia allowed me to catch up with Tim and follow up on what Pandora has been up to in the last 3 months since he and I last chatted on the phone. And as an added bonus, I was able to sit in on one of the Pandora town hall meetings later in the evening. But first, I'll share some of our one on one discussion. I met Tim for lunch at one of my favorite local restaurants. Tim had arrived from California after having visited south western Virginia (Blacksburg, home to Virginia Tech) two weeks before. He had now reached my current hometown of Charlottesville, VA before heading down to North Carolina and continuing farther south to Dallas. Charlottesville is home to the University of Virginia and in fact, about 30 minutes before I met with Tim, he had been speaking with students from UVA's music department. Luckily our late lunch appointment helped us to avoid the lunch rush and allowed me to quickly find my interviewee without having to ask every guy in the restaurant if his name was Tim. In my previous interview, I found Tim to be a gracious and open man, as well as very knowledgeable about his industry. My second impression was no different. After a few minutes of small talk and Charlottesville geography, we got into the musical discussion. We chatted about everything from our favorite music to up and coming MP3 player technology and a little history on TheTechLounge.com. While I had followed some of Tim's adventures on the Pandora blog. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect from the town hall meeting occurring later that night. As Tim explained, the town hall meetings generally start with Tim discussing the history and overview of Pandora after which he invites any and all questions regarding the music service and the digital music industry at large. Eventually the Q&A session becomes the meeting and crowd interaction dictates the rest of the show. I then asked Tim what were his favorite aspect of the meetings. "The Q&A sessions, without a doubt. I love to hear what people think and we often get some good ideas that we later implement on Pandora from our town hall meetings." But more importantly, Tim really enjoys experiencing people's "passion for music." Obviously just about all the folks who attend the meetings love music in some way and that passion is what really drives the discussions and keeps Tim on the road. And his schedule isn't a light one. About every other week Tim finds himself in a new state, on a new stage, in front of new people talking about Pandora, often visiting several cities in just a few days. The pace definitely takes its toll as he rarely has the energy to see the nightlife of the cities and towns he visits. But, as Tim admitted, being up on stage interacting with so many music lovers creates a rush very similar to that of performing music in front of an audience. And as a former traveling musician, that rush is both familiar and addictive for Tim.
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