Ladies and Gentlemen… Tim Westergren

In Jan­u­ary of 2006, I dis­cov­ered Pandora.com.  Almost imme­di­ately, I began telling peo­ple about the site.  A few days later, I even posted a thank you note on my blog to Tim West­er­gren, the founder of Pan­dora.   Yes­ter­day, I had the very dis­tinct honor of intro­duc­ing Tim at the Cincin­nati Social Media Break­fast.  My employer, LUCRUM was gen­er­ous enough to spon­sor the Cincin­nati Social Media Break­fast where Tim was the speaker, and as a result I was given the honor of being the guy who speaks before the guy whom every­one came to see.  It was such a thrill to hear Tim speak, to meet him, and thank him in per­son for the site he created.

Not only is Tim the guy behind one of the coolest sites on the web, he is a great pre­sen­ter and seem­ingly a great guy.   His story is fas­ci­nat­ing, and his pre­sen­ta­tion was open, hon­est, and engag­ing.  He shared some amaz­ing sto­ries about Pan­dora, how it came into exis­tence, how it almost died numer­ous times, and where the site hopes to go in the future.

Here is some of the notable infor­ma­tion Tim shared with us:

• Pan­dora has over 22,000,000 listeners.
• They aver­age about 45,000 new lis­ten­ers per day.
• Each song is decoded and clas­si­fied by a human being.
• 85% of the 600,000 songs on Pan­dora play daily.
• The songs are often arranged in 3 song sets.
• Pan­dora per­son­ally answers every email the com­pany receives.
• Pan­dora views every com­mu­ni­ca­tion with a lis­tener as an oppor­tu­nity, not as a cost.
• Tim has done more than 200 Town Hall meet­ings to talk about the site and con­nect with users.
• Almost all of the company’s mar­ket­ing is done through Town Hall meet­ings and word of mouth.
• Pan­dora users shut down the faxes in the Capi­tol for 4 days when asked to con­tact Con­gress in response to RIAA try­ing to triple fees charged, which would have killed the site.  Con­gress inter­vened and Pan­dora was saved.
• Pan­dora is the #1 iPhone app.
• Tim hopes that the site will one day cre­ate a “Musician’s Mid­dle Class.”
• The site can not tell the dif­fer­ence between unknown acts and super­stars.   It is all dri­ven by the musi­cal pref­er­ences of the indi­vid­ual user.
• Pan­dora will soon be avail­able through numer­ous chan­nels of dis­tri­b­u­tion, includ­ing your car stereo.
• Pan­dora can very specif­i­cally tar­get adver­tis­ing to indi­vid­ual users — age, zip, musi­cal pref­er­ences, lis­ten­ing habits — elim­i­nat­ing much of the waste asso­ci­ated with tra­di­tional broad­cast advertising.
• Poten­tially, Pan­dora could cre­ate a pro­mo­tional ser­vice for bands so they could plan tours stops in areas with a high con­cen­tra­tion of “Thumbs Up” rankings.
• Pan­dora could also serve lis­ten­ers by noti­fy­ing them of pend­ing con­cert dates in the area by bands they already like or would be likely to enjoy based on their musi­cal preferences.
• Pan­dora is not cur­rently legal out­side of the United States.

As a Mar­keter, there were a few things in Tim’s pre­sen­ta­tion that I loved.  One was the impor­tance he placed on the idea of doing what you love.  Clearly Tim is pas­sion­ate about music.  His desire to make music more access­able to other music lovers and to make lis­ten­ers more access­able to musi­cians led to the cre­ation of Pan­dora.  Another great take­away was the power that comes from cre­at­ing some­thing that peo­ple find to be remark­able.   Con­sider that Pan­dora has grown to 22 mil­lion users with­out the use of adver­tis­ing.  That is astound­ing and tes­ta­ment to the power of word of mouth.  Most of all, I was impressed by the intense focus Tim and Pan­dora have on engag­ing and ener­giz­ing their users.  It is clear that Tim views the users of Pan­dora as the most impor­tant part of the equa­tion, and he makes an incred­i­ble effort to lis­ten to them.  Not only did this save the com­pany from cer­tain death, but it has also posi­tioned the com­pany for a suc­cess­ful future.

If you are not a Pandora.com user, check it out.  The site is sim­ply amaz­ing.
.
This is lit­er­ally just a frac­tion of what Tim shared. For more infor­ma­tion check out this video of the event, uploaded to uStream by Kevin Dugan.

Thanks to Kevin Dugan for orga­niz­ing the event. Also thanks to Bryan Per­son who devel­oped the Social Media Break­fast to begin with and who flew in from Austin, TX to join us in Cincin­nati. It was great to meet you. Thanks again to LUCRUM, LPK, P&G, and every­one who helped to make the event pos­si­ble. I can’t wait until the next Social Media Break­fast — hope­fully I can get tickets

prblog tv, Ustream.TV: Just a spot online where I can livestream, broad­cast, video chat and. Technology,Video Chat