Community Blog - Page 3

Thanksgiving, or really this time of year in general, has always carried a complex mix of feelings for me. These days, the world feels heavy in ways that are hard to ignore. And personally, it has been a year of growth, loss, my emotions doing the cha-cha, and everything in between. But even in the chaos, this season still stirs up some of my warmest memories. And because I am me, those memories are stitched together with food and music (in that order).

As I mentioned in my previous blog post celebrating Pandora’s 20th Anniversary, Steve Hogan, the Senior Director of Music Analysis (and my boss), happens to be the most senior member of the Pandora staff, clocking in at the quarter century mark, making me look like a noob with my mere twenty-one years. According to his memory, he was the 18th music analyst hired to the company, back in September of 2000, roughly nine months after the founding of the company.

Steve leading an important meeting

As you may be aware, Pandora is currently celebrating its 20th birthday! Before Pandora’s historic launch as the one of the first personalized online radio platforms, we were a company called Savage Beast. And Savage Beast’s big idea was something called The Music Genome Project.

 The Music Genome Project has been extensively covered here and elsewhere, but, in a nutshell, Savage Beast’s founder, Tim Westergren had the idea that if you analyzed music on a song-by-song basis, that information could be used to create playlists that would help listeners discover new music they loved.

The Music Genome Project worked, and here we are twenty years later, one fifth of the way to building the hundred-year company that Westergren envisioned.

San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Contributor/Getty Images

This was not my first visit to Nashville, but it was my first time attending Americanafest. My friend and coworker and fellow musician (and awesome podcaster) Dan and I went this year to promote Pandora AMP. Dan had previously participated in Americanafest. But my history with the genre had me sort of lamenting that I should’ve started attending a long time ago. Back in the mid 1990s, my first job out of college was with The Gavin Report, a now defunct music trade magazine. I worked my way up to Associate Editor for Rob Bleetstein. If his name sounds familiar, it’s probably because he’s the voice of Pearl Jam Radio on SiriusXM. But back then, Rob was the very first person to chart Americana radio singles. This was 14 years before Billboard published their first Americana chart. Needless to say, he introduced me to a genre of music that changed my life – for the past three decades, I’ve been playing/recording/touring in twangy rock bands and writing about the genre. So yeah…I finally made it to Americanafest this year. Better late than never.