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.
One of the amazing secondary impacts of the Music Genome Project is that it created an engaging, sustainable day job for a bunch of serious musicians. Not only could they earn more than a couple drink tickets to put their musical training to use, but they were helping lesser-known music reach people who might actually enjoy hearing it.
In fact, it was such a satisfying and rewarding job, that Music Analysts invested long-term in the project. Our small team of 22 accounts for a whopping 321 years of Pandora experience (that’s an average of over 14 years per person!!), many of us surpassing the twenty-year mark, actually predating the launch of the product, with the department head of our little family, Steve Hogan, recently hitting the quarter-century mark; the most senior member of the entire Pandora staff.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll bring you some early Pandora and pre-Pandora memories from a handful of us Music Genome long-haulers. The history of this company stretches all the way back to 2000, the tail end of the first wave of the online tech industry. It’s a story of innovation and perseverance and the transformation of how we all experience music in the 21st century.
As for me, I recall being among the very last Music Analysts interviewed directly by founder Tim Westergren, in a small corner office in a very quiet downtown Oakland, a world away from the buzzing tech hub just over the bridge in SF. For my interview test (administered by newly minted manager, Steve Hogan) I had to analyze Sugar Magnolia by the Grateful Dead. I was left alone with a CD player, a pair of headphones, a Casio keyboard and a pencil and paper to work out the musicological details.
My start date was 10/18/2004 along with Jeffrey Burr who currently oversees our priority pipelines… and me (he’s also my manager).
According to our databases, the first album I analyzed was Once by Nightwish, though I can’t say I recall the experience.
I do, however, recall the giant demo kiosks that occupied a corner of our cramped offices. One of the original pre-Pandora ideas was to set up these hulking machines at places like Best Buy where you could type in the name of a band or album you liked, and our Music Genome intelligence would recommend a different album for you to purchase at the store, based on your personal tastes.
Needless to say, we took the business in a different direction.
7 Comments