EPISODE · Dec 2, 2011 · 32 MIN
Tim Westergren
from From Scratch with Jessica Harris · host Brian Williams
Tim Westergren, a former jazz musician and film composer, founded the online radio station Pandora in 2000. Tim brought together a team of musicologists to analyze and classify hundreds of thousands of songs based on some 400 attributes. This project, called the Music Genome Project, is the backbone of Pandora. Pandora works like this: a […]
What this episode covers
Tim Westergren, a former jazz musician and film composer, founded the online radio station Pandora in 2000. Tim brought together a team of musicologists to analyze and classify hundreds of thousands of songs based on some 400 attributes. This project, called the Music Genome Project, is the backbone of Pandora. Pandora works like this: a user enters a song or artist, and Pandora plays songs that most resemble that entry. The company became profitable for the first time ten years after launch, and Pandora has become increasingly popular thanks, in part, to its availability as an app on Apple’s iPhone. Jessica Harris speaks with Tim about his previous musical career and how a small startup blossomed into the most well-known internet radio site, from scratch. Listen to the interview
NOW PLAYING
Tim Westergren
No transcript for this episode yet
Similar Episodes
Mar 26, 2026 ·1m
Jan 2, 2026 ·47m
Dec 21, 2025 ·46m