daily. c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies, and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. joining us this week is steve bene, federal council for pandora media. how did and/or get started? -- pandora get started? steve: it's an honor to be included on the show. founder2000 our had been a composer for film. directorsd talked to that he was supposed to compose film scores for. they would all is told him they wanted something for a particular scene that sounded like this meets that, or some kind of sound they had in mind they would reference from an

existing musician or band. he would try to create something like that. when he decided he didn't want to be a film composer anymore he instead thought wouldn't it be interesting if you were able to walk into a record store, and when you knew he had an artist or band you liked but he didn't know a lot of other artists in the world or new artist, if you could walk up to a kiosk in that store and punched in the name of a band you liked and put on the headphones and they kiosk could tell you were play for you samples of song some other bands you might also like because you imitated you like to particular band or artist. that was how the music genome project was born. they catalog all these songs, thousands and thousands of songs. there are now over a million and a half in the genome.

all those songs have different musical attributes. they have been catalogued by musicologists, many musicians with music degrees. they will catalog a song based on anywhere from 150 to 450 different after beats. ranking from one to five, total quality, rhythm, instrumentals. through that very careful cataloging they put together a library of songs, each with a genetic fingerprint. put thesewent out and kiosks into record stores. they did exactly what they were supposed to do. the problem is the music industry changes from time to time. pretty soon kiosks in record stores were not the best business model to be in. in 2005, they did the same technology and repurposed it and internet radio.

pandora as a service was born 10 years ago on the web as an internet radio service where they used the genome technology to take signals that we get from our users and then we would program the radio station in accordance with laws to string that station under a federal statutory license. alex: what are you doing in washington? steve: as i mentioned before, has been the mainstay of our music licensing up until recently, although we are moving past it. also -- we have various interests in terms of the publishing that goes into the songs they get played on our radio stations. all those constituencies are based out here. although we are interested in

what the goings on in washington, d.c. throughout the course of the company, it is only in the last two years we really built up our d.c. practice to engage with lawmakers and policymakers to try to shape laws, policies and those kind of things in ways we think are good not only for pandora but for the entire music ecosystem. we are interested in creating a service and operating as part of the music world where everybody gets a fair seat at the table and where the spoils are shared sir everyone has an incentive to keep creating industry reading and listening. peter: to help us delve into these issues, alex byers is joining us. alex: thank you. the big focus for pandora over the past two years has been moving from just the internet radio platform to the on-demand streaming. give us a little bit of an update on what that has entailed, in progress on the theness side of things,

product side of things. what do you have to do to make that on-demand product reality? steve: this is the result of some very soul searching strategic thinking going on that probably dates back a couple of years now. it is because the radio product we have had has been immensely successful. -- ad mr. minnis audience tremendous monthly audience, 100 million people a quarter that come on a regular basis in order to let us be there dj and listen to the radio services to get lots of respond and engagement in terms of thumbs up and thumbs down and picking radio stations and all the things you can do on our platform. we have started to find listeners want more than just that experience. a couple of years ago we started looking around and they were on-demand players in the space

"i want to that listen to a particular song or create a playlist i'm interested in." we found that people move and and out of different listening states at different times during the day. sometimes you want to be sort of not engaged in picking your own music. you want somebody who knows you well enough to pick good music for you. sometimes you want to really be highly engaged in music you are hearing. you want to create a playlist, listen to an album, something like that. when we started looking at what the pandora service and and/or products could be we took this holistic view of what we can do. we thought about the different kinds of products we could offer people. some people are going to be radio listeners and don't mind the advertising and get value out of the advertising that is good enough for them to be radio

listeners. broadcast radio has existed on that model for decades. other listeners like the fact we play music and select music for them. it requires little effort on their part. they don't want to listen to ads. for those folks we just introduced a product that is an upgrade our existing product. we call it pandora plus. it take the existing at free radio service but at extra things people like to do like skipping more times or replace. you hear a song you like, you want to replay it. now you can do it right on pandora. and the ability to play music when you're not connected to the internet. when you are off-line and don't want to user data plan. if your at a place with bad cell coverage or something like that. we are currently in development on a pandora styled on-demand product. i can't go into the details yet. we are not ready to release

those. it is going to be on demand in a way that only pandora, with our data, our genome, our decade of experience and actually helping ands discover new music selected music they might want to hear and how the musical tastes can expand. we will apply that approach to an on-demand product that is key. how we have got about developing that is an awful lot of sweat and hard work. we've also made key acquisitions over the last year. ones, and not entirely intuitively and so you think about the full story, was the ticketing business. addressy is meant to interesting things. engageds very large, user base we have people that are music aficionados. everyone is one to a certain extent. most of those people have been to a concert or two in their lives.

we found out as we were looking at different parts of the ecosystem that musicians make an awful lot of their money off of turin and live events -- touring and live events. there is a business in promoting and hosting live events. the biggest single problem in live events is letting interested fans know there is a concert coming. when we were doing the study that led up to the acquisition we figured out about 40% of tickets go on sold, particularly when you talk about live music venues that are 5000 seats or less. the primary reason they go unsold is because people did not know about the event, people who would've been interested in going did not know about it before it was too late. abilityhas to a unique to solve that problem. we already know you are a stone tipple pilots fan -- temple pilots fan, for somebody more

contemporary. fan.ow you are an adele adele is there a different ticketing company, but if we know you are a fan of a particular artist and we know that artist is coming year you, we can put a shout out into your feed that lets you know the artist is coming in as soon as we do more development work we will let you purchase tickets on the service while you listen to the song. alex: let's talk more about the ticketing side. that has been issued you have worked on in washington with a bill that you guys are big supporters of. it would prohibit ticket buying programs from gobbling up tickets to these concerts and then reselling them at a high premium. -- it had ame if lot of. success in congress today it past the commerce

committee. it seems like a lot of people like the underlying idea. i'm wondering if you have any pushback on parts of the bill, especially given that it seeks to sort of control to some extent what people can do with computers, the kinds of programs you are allowed to write. that is an issue that is in a problem for digital activist in the past with computer product -- computer fraud and abuse act. is that an issue you have had to deal with? steve: you are absolutely right. it has been great to see it in a bipartisan support. we are encouraged by it. we view it as a matter of access. do buynately, bots tickets. what they do is keep other fans out of the market. what we are finding is some fans

really want to go see a concert. they can mash the buttons on the computer all day long but you can't beat a bot. they are not able to get tickets in their first run at the list price. they are left with only the opportunity of buying those tickets on the secondary market after the bots got them and passed them on to promoters. a lot of fans don't have the opportunity to get to the concert because they are priced out of the market. buy the tickets on the secondary market are paying a lot more for them than they would otherwise have had to if they could of had fair access to those tickets on the first one on sale. all of this doesn't put any more money in the pocket of promoters or venues or artists. we see this as a fundamental fairness issue in terms of access and the ability to buy tickets. the general public does not have access to being able to program a computer bot to get tickets as

quickly as possible. by an allen does it to the stockport -analogize into the stock market. in millionths of a second. streaminues this revenue and allows concert and venues and things like that to go ahead and reach the fans they want to reach, give artists that are interested in this who want the not really with less concerned about their ability to able to put the initial purchase price of the ticket. on the radio side there is a lot of talk about how artists are compensated. at pandora, what is your policy? artists played in your radio station.

steve: this is what is going through a major shift right now. compensationour for recording artists, we have used the statutory license, copyright section 114 in order to play the sound recordings we play on our radio service. section 114 comes with some limitation on how we can mix in recordings of different artists at different times. and it features a functionality for that service. it is meant to be a radio-like service to qualified. with that a statutory license rate best we went through those proceedings last year. playsnt of the number of of any particular song that we have. it is in the billions. every quarter we send the information to a service called sound exchange, the designated service on a half of the copyright royalty board to administer payments for the

statutory license. we write the check the sound exchange for all the plays on the service we have had. sound exchange divvies it up among the rights holders. half of this payments actually go directly to the featured artist, back of artists, and in some cases the producers that worked on the albums and songs. roughly half of it goes to the labels that represent the ownership interests in those songs. that is one of the great features of a statutory license and the payment process through sound exchange. artists get paid directly. they don't have to go through labor recoupment models to get that check. they get a nice, reliable check every quarter they are able to count on for those services. alex: let's talk about what is going on in washington right now. there is the house copyright review. david pursuing for a few years now -- that talk is the next

congress will be when the real action happens. give me your frank assessment. we were supposed to see more from the committee over the past several months in terms of outlines of where the direction they might be going. as far as i am aware they have not been circulated publicly. with the you think? will we see a music relicensing reform in congress or is that too big for washington to accomplish? steve: first off i don't know anything you don't know. i don't know what timing is likely. i have not seen any contours of what a conference of copyright licensing bill might look like. and we have been consistent about this in the conversations we've had with various stakeholders, there are a lot of different things to be folded into a copyright rewrite. people can debate all kinds of different issues and pieces of what a copyright rewrite can

include. my view is that none of this will actually come to fruition or be effective unless you solve the core data problem that comprises the bottom of music rights administration. there is no way for services like us or the general public or even artists groups, publisher groups, to know with fidelity and certainty who owns what. this is especially acute in the publishing arena because you have songs with sony, writers and co-owners. even in the sound recording arena there is no way of knowing who owns rights to what piece of copyrighted music. kind -- in myome view is an endorsement of the copyright office said in the report last year, which was

there is nobody better than the government to at least oversee this data project. i think they are right and i hope any kind of copyright rewrite will come with a requirement or some kind of framework for putting data into a central repository for people can have access to it, where it can be searched on not just an individual basis but on a sort of scale basis. and we2.5 million songs would get more every day as a run to an on-demand service. you can't search for rights on an individual song basis. you have to have machine interface that searches for those. alex: let's talk about the copyright office. a lot of conventional wisdom is if there is something to address in the near term on a copyright review, it will be modernization of the office which is known to be a laggard when it comes to updating technology. beyond the upgrades there has

been a question of should the copyright office be part of the library of congress or its own standalone entity. there is been a lot of debate. what seemsave seen to be an increase and a lot of digital groups that are aligned with pandora on a lot of copyright issues really orstioning the biases motives of the copyright office in saying they are kind of in the pocket of the industry. i wonder if you worry about the same thing or if there is something else that could be done in terms of making sure the copyright office is a neutral arbiter. steve: i think what is most important is the first point he mentioned. i am not sure the copyright office is the right place for data repository of music rights licensing or of music rights ownership.

they will certainly have a very big role in overseeing the creation of something like that if it were to come to fruition. i think the technological advances forward are very much a part of copyright office reforms. i think that is exactly where the emphasis ought to be placed. a big role to play in being able to fulfill this mission. i am not sure having a bias one way or another within that effort is avenue of going to matter so much. it matters more that they are trying to get something like this created and they are contributed to the mechanisms or incentives to get creative and they can at least oversee whether it is a public-private collaboration or a full on public endeavor. that it is done in the right way. alex: even outside the

transparency context when the office is waiting in on matters ingcopyright law, -- weigh in, is it from a neutral perspective? steve: is there a particular instance? alex: there have been papers written and the electronic found he -- electronic frontier foundation is looking into this. the contention is that this is a recurring issue. matters weess in the have looked at the copyright office and in the papers that i ,ave studied they have put out the opinions they have used to help inform major issues, i did not get a sense of bias when i was looking at the copyright office white paper that came out last year.

offered -- it think in the background section of that there was some language that might have been a little bit negative towards pandora. something i might not have agreed with. when it came down recommendations i thought they were largely down the road in terms of the way they were trying to envision the solution to some of the problems they saw within the music licensing regime. i would say recently i know they criticism for the input they gave to the justice department. i know some of the outlets you are talking about have criticized them for that. less about them being biased in terms of content, can really much more about the fact that they, of necessity, were

speaking purely on copyright law issues. this is not a purely copyright law problem. whether they were just thinly sticking to their mandate of commenting on the state of copyright law with decree issues, where they were trying to point to a certain outcome by not addressing antitrust issues, i think we were clear they were not doing that. that seemed like a limitation in the response the doj got. peter: this pandora and sparta etc., doand spotify, you have the same regulations and am/fm station would face? should you? steve: i think the answer to that question is generally yes, we do. i think all the streeters and outlets -- disturbing readers

and outlets -- distributors and outlets for popular music generally, well, it is not so much criticism. people assume our interests are aligned in the way that we approach these policy and we approach the music ecosystem. i think there is a little bit of misconceptions around that. there are some issues where we very much pay in the same way and through the same mechanisms and we have aligned interests. we were talking about the consent decrees and the way we pay for composition rights through ascap, bmi, and the other pro's. in that case we have the same bmi of licenses with ascap that the broadcasters to. him that spot iify does an apple does. we talk about reform, we are speaking from a similar

experience. we are not speaking from similar experience when it comes to sound recording policy reform. we have been one of the heaviest users of section 114. that is not going to be true going forward. we just signed landmark agreements with not only four of the major sound recording aggregates out there, and aggregation of independent labels from europe and others in the u.s., but we also signed dozens of direct deals with a lot of independent labels. we are quickly moving from a statutory payment regime and to a private negotiation regime. forow that is not the case serious xm and broadcast radio does not pay at all for sound recordings they play.

we come from very different perspectives and i think we have a very different relationship as a result of that with content holders and the song writers, artists in the music industry as a result. the different ways we have chosen to engage. alex: on am/fm, you purchased the station's south dakota -- a station in south dakota. but there was a filing the city might sell it. has a been a decision? steve: no, and that was some misinformation. certainly not released by us. alex: there was a filing from the sec for you guys. steve: we asked if it was possible -- the fcc asked us as a condition of granting the license for the transfer of the licensed to put provisions in our charter documents in order to be able to make sure we were keeping track of the ownership

of the company. we ask them for a year delay to put that in front of our shareholders. it was not as a result of wanting to sell the business. it was a result of having other things we needed to focus on. we were hoping to get in a straight year be up to comply with that provision. the fcc said no. we went ahead and put it the charter documents and now it is there. we have no current plans to sell the business. hoped then -- we process of play listing and providing music to our listeners over the internet radio service would also be a good value add and a way to revolutionize the way broadcast visa cousin played. it's been an interesting experiment. i don't know if we are interested in broadening that experiment. they are part of the pandora family and we like having them. peter: steve, you mentioned at

the beginning that pandora is upgrading its d.c. office. does it surprise how much interaction you are having with the regulators and legislators? steve: know, it is not surprise me. -- no, it does not surprise me. by upgrading, you mean we started with nobody over two years ago and now we have a fully functioning and extremely effective group of folks that are engaging in our policy issues. we think there is a lot of good pandora can do in advancing the policy agenda. one of the things we're talking about is the bill alex raised before. we are also working now with members on both sides of congress in both houses to address the issue of pre-1972 recordings. this great, efficient system where we are paying into a sound

exchange and that money gets taken in and paid out to recording artists doesn't apply to records that were cut before february of 1972. there is no effective way right now, although we know which songs we play on our service, there is no effective way of getting this people paid. their is no way of determining how much those people get paid. it is really a shame because what these artists are left with, these heritage artists are left with, no other way to get compensated. class-action litigations are the worst way i can think of to get compensation to anybody that deserves it. we are working with members of both houses of congress and across the aisle to get a bill put together that would allow these pre-1972 recordings to be accounted for and paid in the same way through the same efficient mechanism that post-1972 recordings.

peter: have been for a long time -- steve: thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] c-span, where history unfolds daily. c-span was created as a public service by america's cable-television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. >> on the next washington journal, chicago tribune columnist clarence page talks about the future of the democratic party and progressive movement. henry olson from the ethics and public policy center discusses the future of the republican party. we will take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. washington journal, live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span.

>> it james madison is the architect of the constitution george washington is the general contractor. the result looks a lot more like with the general contractor has in mind and what the architect has in mind. edward larson talks about george washington's role in unifying the country and ratifying the first federal document in his new book, "george washington, nationalist." they wanted to recruit washington. hamilton had talked to washington before about this democracy stuff will never work. you have to be king. washington believed republican government. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q&a. say decembercials 4 is a day for the funeral of former cuban president fidel castro who died last night at

the age of 90. let the castro revolutionary forces overthrew the government of president batista. at age 32 he became the youngest leader in latin america. here is a newsreel look at his rise to power. ♪ buildingllion machete peasants jammed the square before cuba's national capital for a celebration of the six anniversary of his 26th of july revolutionary movement. is perhaps the gratis mass rally in the western hemisphere. a demonstration of castro's's weight over the cuban masses. another aspect, the a predictable castro dons a baseball uniform to pitch a full inning in a game for his agrarian reform fund. newew president -- his

president tosses the first ball. he strikes up a three batters he faces. that is one game where the ump has to be careful. -- viva vidfidel. masses, like in city slums was depressing. filth and disease flourished, yet most of these poor cubans, the proletariat mob, suffered as of their was unaware of another way to live. ♪ castro was ready to come out, to supporters based not on the poor but on the middle class. ♪ ironically, it is the knowledgeableho