Live from New York, it's Pandora...and Portugal. The Man

This evening, we are hosting our second live event as part of a new listener appreciation series. Tonight's concert features Portugal. The Man, and we've invited some of the band's most avid New York City fans to a free show at The Bowery Ballroom. One of the central missions of Pandora is to bring together bands and fans. We've been successfully doing that online for some time now, so it's exciting to see this offline component now coming to life!

We've started a special page on Pandora so that fans across the country can follow the series. Check out www.pandora.com/pandorapresents to see some of the special content, such as behind the scenes interviews, thoughts from fans, and special mixtapes that are curated by the featured band, including Portugal. The Man and the first band of the series, Dawes.

Our first show was held in Portland, Oregon, on December 13. There will be more shows to come throughout this year, so stay tuned for the next city and band announcement.

We're really looking forward to tonight's show (which is brought to our fans for free, courtesy of Budweiser). If you don't have a pass for tonight's show, a few have been set aside to give away at the door at 7 p.m. Get there early if you'd like to join us for an awesome night.

- Tim (Founder)

Hometown town hall...

We had a great get-together last Thursday in our very own hometown of Oakland, CA at a perfect spot called Preservation Park, right downtown.

A really large crowd showed up, loaded with lots of questions and comments:

There were many questions about how we decide what music goes in Pandora, and on how artists are paid - including from a number of musicians whose music is on Pandora. There were also questions and suggestions about advertising on our site - is it targeted? For example, one married attendee asked about the frequency of dating site ads...I assured her this wasn't a hint of any kind!

Pandora is very conservative on this issue, and it is heartening that our listeners also have a pragmatic attitude about the business benefits - good thing considering how Pandora works!

Folks also had a lot of questions about specific stations (Allman Band, Led Zeppelin, flamenco music...) with an equal mix of complaints and compliments - one thing that our attendees learned, as did I, is that our suggestion option isn't as obvious as it could be. Need to fix that.

I was particularly struck by the number of people who were interested in Pandora's relationship to the local community, and how we see community work and philanthropy in terms of our company's mission. That's a major topic inside Pandora right now. We've been doing a lot, but are thinking strategically about how to expand. Oakland definitely has a lot of community pride. It's great to finally be able to meaningfully contribute to our community.

Really heartwarming question from someone to close off the evening: "how can we be better listeners?" Pretty cool :)

Tim (Founder)

Pandora playing in a store near you

I have lost count of the number of times a Pandora listener has told me that they learned about our service from their hair dresser, dentist, barista or bartender. I've also been saving a long list of emails from business owners, large and small, who have written to us in growing numbers since we launched Pandora asking when we might offer Pandora for use in a commercial setting. I'm really excited to be able to tell these folks that we now have an offering just for them. We have recently established a partnership with a company called DMX. They're an innovator in the commercial music space and have integrated Pandora into a product that is designed for use in business establishments. It is a very affordable solution that enables all types of businesses from car dealerships to medical offices to salons and coffee shops to play Pandora.

With this service, businesses can effortlessly personalize their in-store music program to match their environment and brand, and create the perfect in-store and in-office sound for you, their customers.

The next time you're settling into the dentist chair or - much better - sidling up to a bar, ask them if they're playing Pandora. If they're not, you can tell them to check it out here: www.dmx.com/pandora

- Jessica

Milwaukee Town Hall

Great town hall last night in Milwaukee at the Iron Horse.

In spite of rain and a Brewers playoff game we had a full house (though we ended in time for folks to see the last few innings, Brewers leading by one).

Lots of great conversation as usual, including quite a bit of discussion about the advertising on Pandora. Listeners clearly have a desire to find different ways to interact with the ads - book marking them, saving for later, expressing preferences on their favorite kind of ads, etc.

It was really interesting to survey listeners on their usage. In a show of hands, a substantial majority listened to Pandora on smartphones, and a substantial majority of them listened to it in the car. That's a serious trend for us. That number looked very different a year ago.

There also continues to be an appetite for greater control over station curation - ie. being able to control individual attributes. This group was clearly a group of power users!

A great visit.

Tim (Founder)

Meeting Dr. Watson, Co-Discoverer of DNA and Creator of the Human Genome Project

I had the rare treat of meeting with, and presenting Pandora and the Music Genome Project to the scientist who actually discovered DNA, Dr. James Watson. He's a wonderful man with an obvious curiosity, and some very strong opinions about Chinese opera!

Had a terrific time touring the Cold Spring Harbor facility out on Long Island, where a global assembly of some of the world's brightest natural scientists come together to do bench research. We convened for a town hall in a seminar room full of biologists and their friends to talk Genome.

It was certainly an unusual town hall with a whole new set of questions around the science and implications of the Music Genome Project.

One comment that really struck me was the idea of inserting random songs into stations to see if it would generate a spontaneous and random improvement - just like a genetic mutation! It's a really interesting notion, after all, that's the process that has defined human evolution for thousands of years.

Looking forward to our Milwaukee town hall tomorrow night (10/13) at the Iron Horse Hotel.

Tim (Founder)

Pandora Gift Cards in a store near you

In a fun recent development, for the first time ever we now have Pandora One gift cards available in Target stores across the country. It's really exciting to see Pandora featured in a retail location. Something about a physical object in a brick and mortar store that feels a bit different, and really cool. They make a great gift - especially for all of you last-minute gift givers (you know who you are).

Enjoy!

Tim (Founder)

Pandora shifts into high gear!

Over the past few years we've heard a growing chorus of listeners asking about our plans for bringing Pandora into the car. Many of you are likely plugging your smartphones into an aux jack to get Pandora through your car speakers already, but we know that the long term solution is something more seamlessly integrated with the vehicle.

To that end, for several years now we've had an extensive engineering and business effort underway to bring Pandora into vehicle dashboards - and it's now starting to bear fruit, with Pandora-enabled cars and trucks actually hitting the showrooms.

We're currently partnered with 11 of the world's most well-known automotive brands and many aftermarket manufacturers and have had a steady stream of vehicle launches over the last few months. We thought it would be useful to pull together a list of the car companies and car audio manufacturers whose products support Pandora...just in case you're in the market for a new ride or you're retrofitting your sound system.

• BMW
• MINI
• Buick
• Chevrolet
• GMC
• Ford
• Lincoln
• Hyundai
• Mercedes-Benz
• Scion
• Toyota
• Alpine Electronics
• JVC
• Kenwood
• Pioneer
• Sony

These auto integrations rely on the Pandora application that you have running on your smartphone today. When you hook up your phone with your car and launch Pandora, the popular controls of the Pandora service - like station selection and thumbs feedback - shift into the vehicle dashboard so you don't have to fiddle with your phone to enjoy and interact with Pandora while driving. That way, as our auto partners have been known to say, you can "keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road" while enjoying your Pandora stations.

We'll do our best to keep listeners informed of the latest automotive launches. Our ambition is to have Pandora built into every model of every car - making personalized radio just as ubiquitous and easy to use as traditional broadcast radio. There's much more to come.

I do hope you have the opportunity to enjoy personalized radio in the car. It's a simple, yet transformational experience!

- Jessica

New Pandora for All

Today is a big day for Pandora: after more than a year of planning, design, engineering, and beta testing we're launching an entirely new Pandora website.

In late 2010 we started with a clean sheet of paper, challenging ourselves to create a new internet radio experience that was fast, social, and easy while still being familiar to the tens of millions of people that listen to Pandora each month.

The result is "New Pandora" -- the same personalized radio experience you've enjoyed for years, wrapped in a new HTML5 look that makes it more responsive, easier to use, and better integrated with the friends and music lovers in your life. We also think it looks more beautiful than ever, but we're biased.

For the last two months we've been gradually rolling a preview of the new site out to our listeners, taking their feedback, fixing bugs and making improvements here and there. With all those little fixes and refinements in place, today we're rolling out the new site for everyone.

Some of our new features include:

Simplified Station Creation - Enhanced auto-complete choices and personalized suggestions make creating new stations and discovering new music or comedy more intuitive and personal.

Discovery of Music with Friends - Enhanced listener profiles and a new music feed offer a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora. The music feed will roll out slowly over the course of the coming days. In addition to the prominent new "share" button, stations now have their own URLs, making it super easy for listeners to share favorite stations via Twitter, Facebook, or email.

Improved Control - Prominent and ubiquitous access to familiar player control buttons including Play, Pause, Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down icons helps listeners to easily personalize their music and comedy stations. A new shuffle feature also allows listeners to shuffle any collection of stations to add variety to their listening experience.

Enhanced Artist Information - An option to learn more about the music, find lyrics, read artists' biographies and expand the album art size.

Unlimited listening - We've removed the 40 hours listening cap - you can now listen as much as you want for free.

The new social feed will roll out over the next few days to everyone and we want to remind you that you control of how others see your Pandora profile page and listening activity. Here's a link to view and to edit your privacy settings. http://www.pandora.com/#/account/privacy

We'd love to hear what you think of our latest project. To let us know what you think, to get help, or to find answers please visit http://help.pandora.com.

Behind the Scenes at Pandora

As we've settled into a larger office space in downtown Oakland, we have recently restarted our Pandora Concert Series of intimate shows for Pandora employees. These performances take place on our very own stage in our common area, affectionately called "Backstage." Recently, we've been honored to welcome and hear the Mother Hips, Ben Folds and, most recently, Oakland's own Raphael Saadiq, whom I interviewed after he and his band played a rocking set.

When we welcome artists to our office, the first stop is typically a high-level behind the scenes look at the Music Genome Project, and we provide some detailed insights about how their music in our collection is analyzed and played. It's really intriguing for us — and for the artist — to go over how the Music Genome Project really works, and it's fascinating to discuss with artists the musical attributes we've identified in their work. We have an opportunity to hear them talk about their vision for those compositions when they wrote and recorded them. Then we get to hear them play live! It's great.

Before we wrap the visit, there's a sit-down for a recorded Q&A to hear stories about their music and career. In addition to our "day" jobs, many of us here at Pandora are musicians by trade. The musician-to-musician discussions that unfold in the post-performance Q&A give us the chance to learn about the artists' formal training, practice regimens, stories about the best of times and the worst of times, and advice the artists would give to children of their own about pursuing a career in music.

You can see this for yourself - we've posted our interview with Raphael Saadiq:

The visits have been really special for us here at Pandora. They remind us of the impact that radio makes for artists connecting with new fans, and the unique role that Pandora plays in those introductions by making radio a personalized discovery experience. We're excited to welcome additional artist guests in the coming months and share them with you.

- Jessica

Executive Vice President of Business and Corporate Development

An update on the new Pandora.com

We've been hard at work on the new version of Pandora.com since my last update here -- processing your feedback, fixing bugs and generally improving the entire experience. We'd all like to give a big "thank you" to those of you who have experimented with the new site and taken time to share your thoughts with us. We're dedicated to making the new site faster, easier, and more social than any version of Pandora that has come before and your feedback is helping to us turn that vision into reality.

Right now, every Pandora One subscriber has the option to use the redesigned web version of Pandora. All you need to do is visit us at http://www.pandora.com, login to your Pandora One account, and look for the invitation to use the new site across the top of the page. Don't forget to send us your feedback to support@pandora.com. We'd love to hear what you think.

We'll start rolling out the new site to our ad-supported listeners during the next few weeks. While we're delighted with the look of the new site, we are even more excited about the new opportunities for listener interaction, music discovery, and easier navigation. As millions more listeners are poised to try out the new Pandora.com soon, we're looking forward to hearing what you have to say and incorporating your feedback as well.

Thanks for listening,

Tom Conrad
CTO and EVP of Product