♪ emily: his first love was the piano. he spent 10 years on the road, playing keyboard in a rock band, touring in a beat-up van. along the way, he met so many musicians without an audience he decided to bring the audience to them. in 2000, he created the music genome project, a database that aims to predict what you want to hear. you know it as pandora. today, more than 80 million people tune in every month to listen to millions of songs on over 7 billion pandora stations.

joining me today on "studio 1.0," pandora founder tim westergren. thanks for joining us. so great to have you. what is on your playlist these days? tim: the center of my musical bull's-eye is ben folds. he is a p&l player and a great songwriter. station, i find other artists that i like. a big font of discovery. i have jazz, punk, folk, country. emily: i was pleased to find the "frozen" station, the toddler radio station. tim: very popular. emily: when did you discover your own musical talent? tim: i began playing piano when i was seven, living in france, and learned just enough about chord structures and improvisation to allow me to get around the keyboard. after that, i fell in love with it. after i graduated, i spent the first five years after school playing piano eight or nine

hours a day. emily: where did you play? tim: my living room. emily: but how did you support yourself? i know you played at a holiday inn. tim: i did a bunch of gigs i would like to forget, but i was a nanny after college about five years. i took care of kids. my life was piano all morning, afternoon with kids, and come back home and play piano. taking care of kids is a good preparation for managing a rock band. emily: [laughter] emily: because that came next. you actually went on the road. tim: we are on the road all the time. got to see this whole world, this invisible world of working musicians, for a long time. emily: what was the band called? tim: yellowwood junction. emily: and what point do you say, this is not going to pay the bills? reality was a steady throughout the time. ultimately, film composing was the next chapter of my career. emily: so you went to hollywood,

another easy place to make it. tim: i began trying to compose for any film i could get my hands on. i did a student short film. it could be a commercial. i was getting ready to move to l.a. and jump in wholeheartedly when the idea for this company popped into my head. emily: what was the lightbulb moment? tim: i read an article about aimee mann, singer-songwriter. she had a sizable audience but not quite big enough for her to get attention. she was kind of in this no man's land. it was among all these hundreds of musicians i had known, all living in obscurity, and how much talent there was nobody knew about. and then in my work as a film composer, one thing i had learned to do was understand someone's taste. i did that by essentially putting them through a musical interview, where i would play songs for them. based on their thumbs up, thumbs down, or reactions to what i played for them, i would kind of hone in on their taste or what they wanted for their movie.

literally i thought, that , moment, if i could codify that, and then build a discovery tool? emily: that was the beginning of a seed that became the music genome project. tim: exactly. emily: a part human, part algorithm way to figure out what people want to listen to. tell us how it works. tim: what we have done since 2000 -- we built this 450 attribute musical taxonomy with every dimension of melody, harmony, rhythm, and performance, like musical dna. we have had musicians, trained musicians, analyze songs one at a time and score them attribute by attribute to establish a musical fingerprint for every song. emily: what are they asking? how happy is this, how emotional is this, how much bass is there? tim: they get trained before they do this. emily: you pitched this 348 times before an investor picked it up.

tim: during those years, about 50 people worked without getting paid. it was a tough time. emily: 50 people worked without getting paid for two full years? tim: a little over two years. everyone believed the idea was powerful. emily: it was an interesting time, the height of napster. a lot of trauma in the music industry. tim: the likelihood of our company surviving was infinitesimally small. the music industry at the time, a lot of people thought it would literally disappear. we were technically bankrupt the entire time. i maxed out 11 credit cards by the end of 2003. and i owed hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to people. it was frightening. emily: how may times did you think about giving up? tim: i actually never thought about giving up. that was not an option for me. i was going down with the ship. it was not until 2005 we took a

left-hand turn and repurposed the music genome project into something different, one-click custom radio which we launched in the fall of 2005 and it took off like a rocket ship. we have had near-death experiences since then, but just two the chapters to this country, pre-and post pandora. emily: here we are, the 10-year anniversary of pandora. tim: we had the idea we would be ad supported. initially, we thought we would be a subscription business, but it was very short-lived, because consumers did not accept that. when we grew, our idea was to be ad supported. it was touch and go for a long time. last year was our first profitable year as a matter of fact. emily: you went public in 2011. tim: i was proud of that. it is a marker. not many companies get to go public. how unlikely it was was not lost on me that day. that is never far from my mind. that was quite a moment, and i

think everybody was really proud of it. emily: why didn't taylor swift pull her music off pandora? ♪

♪ emily: the quest for the perfect

playlist includes spotify, itunes radio, beats, i heart radio, amazon music, tidal. how do you think about your competition? tim: anybody who has a radio product. broadcast radio is the biggest competitor. itunes radio, when it came out, definitely direct competitor. when we think about our future, it is about, how do we remain the best playlist-building business around? i think so far the numbers bear it out. we keep growing in spite of this competition. emily: sirius xm, a competitor. tim: with apple, a smart company. never underestimate, never think you know what they are doing. emily: beats music will be retooled and relaunched this summer. maybe a new name.

how worried are you? tim: we have not lacked competition for a long time. i keep learning year after year, building a great playlist is fantastic hard to do. we find, over time, more and more confidence in the differentiation we have. emily: did you ever meet steve jobs? tim: i did. emily did you talk to him about : the future of music? tim: we said two words to each other. we had the great honor to be on stage at cupertino when they wanted pandora to be highlighted. tom and i spent a week in a room rehearsing a three-minute presentation, and we were kept under lock and key and escorted in and out of the building. we had to rehearse the talk many, many times for a successively smaller and smaller group of executives, until the final comes up. up.l -- the final

he did say "good job" after our presentation. i take that as great praise. emily: there has always been simmering talk about, why doesn't apple buy pandora? did apple try to buy pandora? tim: we don't comment on things like that, of course. i look at them as this incredible partner. stepping back, they have invented this field we benefit from. emily: spotify just raised $400 million at an $8.5 billion valuation. that is more than twice pandora's market cap. they are more focused on subscriptions. pandora is more focused on ads. what you think about that comparison? tim: we stick to our knitting. this is an exciting business with drama and news. the best we can do is stay focused on what we do. you have figured out how to monetize internet radio, which no one else has. we have hundreds of sellers in 50 markets around the country who are now penetrated into local advertising. in the long run, that kind of

foundation is how you build a really big business. emily: do you think people do not want to pay for music? tim: i think people will absolutely. there will always be a large number of people who want to listen to music without advertising and are willing to subsidize that. i think there will be an even larger audience that will pay to transact with an artist to whom they feel connected. and i think that is one of the great opportunities pandora can unlock. emily: spotify started abroad. it is in 50 countries. pandora is in three -- the u.s., australia, new zealand. is that something you will figure out, or is this how your business is going to be? tim: i think international is inevitable. it is not a question of if, it is when. for us, it is a matter of finding the right license. emily: in the next era, will negotiating directly

with streaming services? tim: we have done direct deals. the key is, do both sides understand the value the other brings? emily: it seems like tidal, apple, spotify, they get the buzz. does it affect the business? the stock is down from highs over the summer. tim: the little engine that could. we have been through a lot of ups and downs. that has been part of our dna as a culture. we are a modest culture. we treasure humility. it is a company principle. there has been 25 "pandora killers" we can count. we do not get frustrated by who has the limelight. emily: will pandora ever offer live traffic, weather, sports? tim: there is non-music, sports news -- i think that will eventually find a home on pandora. the thing is, how do you do that in a way that is elegantly integrated with the music experience? it would be nice to be listening to a station and get on the hour bloomberg tv, or on the hour geographically targeted sports or news. so eventually. right now, we are focused on music.

but i think that will come sometime. emily: what about podcasts? tim: another interesting category. we have comedy, non-music content. what we would like to do is bring our own twist. how do we help that be easily navigable? had we bring intelligence, a curation approach? but i could easily imagine that on pandora someday. emily: what about music videos on pandora? will that happen? tim: interesting to consider. only a fraction of our catalog of quality music videos. that could change over time. you can see potentially elegant ways to give someone that little, i want to snack on some video right now. emily: we have a presidential race happening. i know you guys are trying to add local and national ad dollars. what is your pitch to advertisers right now? tim: our political advertising business has grown exponentially over these years. in some ways, it is tailor-made for it, because we can

geographically target messaging through audio, video messages. i anticipate that will grow and grow. one of the amazing things about data -- we can predict based on your zip code and style of music you are listening to your political affiliation, with 90% accuracy. emily: who are the democratic artists and republican artists? tim: music defies stereotypes, so i'm always loads to make them. but the data is powerful and productive. emily: are you playing music anymore? tim: i went cold turkey when i founded the company. i did not have time for anything and i kind of needed a break. it was years away from the piano. i have had the itch for a while and then back into it. emily: what is next for tim westergren? tim: i want to get back into composing, which is my real passion. and then i would really like to see pandora as a platform to really have a positive social impact. emily: pandora in 10 years, where will it be? tim: it will be global, for one.

it will have billions of people on it. i think it will also change what it means to be a musician. and i remember in my early 30's thinking, i feel so much pressure to quit music and go get a job, because i was not making enough money. and i know a lot of musicians who went through that. the vast majority do. and that is a huge loss for our society, because artists do not get to keep making art. it is true of all forms of art. what if music was a more stable career? maybe tens of thousands of musicians could take a living, not just a few hundred. maybe it would literally change the place of music and culture. and that is what i think we can affect. emily: we will check back with you in a decade, i guess. tim westergren, thank you for joining us. great to have you. thank you. ♪

♪ emily: it is a show about a bunch of geeks locked in a house, writing code. a most unsexy, un-hollywood premise that is now an hbo hit. the show is named after the world it lampoons. "silicon valley" pokes fun at the idiosyncrasies. behind the show, two people who have brought us some of the greatest satire in entertainment history. mike judge of "office space" and "beavis and butthead," and alec berg, writer on "seinfeld."