It powered a few in-store kiosks at Best Buy and Tower Records, but the Music Genome Project itself never found a viable market fit. The company spent years developing its Music Genome Project music recommendation engine to help people find new songs and artists similar to their existing tastes in music.
PANDORA RADIO FOUNDED LICENSE
“At that time the four labels didn't want digital music to really exist, but we found this one piece in internet radio where there was the statutory license that, I felt, gave the potential to create a business of value and avoid this phenomenon one board member referred to as an organ donor business - where you just exist to funnel money to the major record labels.”Īs a quick background, Savage Beast Technologies was founded in 1999 by Tim Westergren and would later become Pandora. “It was already clear to us that most of digital music was a disaster from a business standpoint,” said Former Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy. Radio was the path to profitability in the music industry. Behind the scenes, the magic was in how Pandora was able to provide access to all these songs, without asking the major labels for permission.įor Joe Kennedy, Tim Westergren, Jessica Steel, and Tom Conrad, the four Pandora executives leading the company's rebirth as a digital broadcaster in 2004, this was the only path forward. On the surface, at the listener level, the magic was in how all the songs were linked and connected. People could type in a song or artist they liked and get a never-ending stream of related music. It was the first real introduction to digital streaming music for a lot of America’s population in the mid-2000s. Pandora’s personalized radio service took the FM listening experience, put it online, and exploded the typically narrow path to music discovery for millions of people. Pandora would win that battle, but in doing so, it also found itself stuck with a business model that could not evolve alongside the streaming space. The solution was the radio model of music licensing, a brilliant strategy at the time, but one which would be the subject of a long fight between Pandora and the recording industry. To take on this legal and lobbying juggernaut, Pandora needed a clever strategy to avoid the kind of head-on fights that had sunk Napster. It was, however, an innovator in digital music at a time when the major labels were hostile to the entire concept and would fight on every front to preserve the lucrative of the compact disc era. © 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc.It's not that Pandora was oblivious to its competition, or complacent about its place in the industry. Pandora faces stiff competition from services such as Sweden’s Spotify, Apple’s Apple Music, Google Play Music and Amazon’s Amazon Music Unlimited, which dominate the on-demand music service market. The company could not be immediately reached for comment.Įarlier this month, Sirius XM Holdings said it would invest $480 million in Pandora, giving the satellite radio company better exposure to internet music streaming while providing financial footing to Pandora.
Westergren, who co-founded Pandora in 2000, served as its Chief Executive and president from May 2002 to July 2004, before returning to the company as its chief executive last year. The company has not yet selected a replacement for Westergren, who is likely to stay on at Pandora until a new chief executive is in place, Recode reported on Sunday. Music streaming service Pandora Media’s founder and chief executive, Tim Westergren, plans to step down, Recode reported citing people familiar with the company’s plans. SiriusXM in talks to renew Howard Stern contract amid pandemic
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