Pandora radio makes up more than 60 percent of Internet radio listening in the United States. When Jessica Steel, executive vice president of business and corporate development at Pandora Media Inc. received a phone call from her nephew Aza Steel, a third-year sociology student, asking if she would come speak at UCLA as Sigma Eta Pi’s guest speaker, she immediately agreed to do so. Tonight, Steel will speak about the music industry and the start-up lessons she has learned. Steel spoke to the Daily Bruin’s Marjorie Yan about the story behind the company’s name, the Music Genome Project and Pandora’s view on the rise of social media platforms and Spotify.
Daily Bruin: Why the name Pandora?
Jessica Steel: I remember the day our CEO came back from lunch with a couple of names written on the back of a cocktail napkin. We were in the process of choosing a name at that point, and Pandora was one of them. He had been in the automotive industry, and he had to name car lines, and so Greek names are something that commonly tapped into those exercises. When we focus group-tested the name Pandora, the thing that set it apart was people’s recollection of the name. It was 10 times more memorable than any of the other names we tested. It’s very phonetic and people are able to spell it out.
DB: What were some other names that were considered?
JS: Thebeast.fm and thebeast.com since the company was called Savage Beast Technology. I’m really glad it turned out to be Pandora.
DB: How has Pandora evolved with the rise of social media platforms?
JS: It’s been predominantly a word-of-mouth phenomenon. It’s people finding the product, falling in love with the playlists and introducing it to their friends. That’s certainly been made more frictionless by Pandora’s presence on mobile phones. Pandora is one of the most downloaded apps on every major platform that we’re on.
DB: With the rise in popularity of Spotify and other music streaming outlets, how would you say Pandora has responded?
JS: Our growth actually accelerated at the time Spotify came to the United States, and we see the services as complimentary to each other. We set out to re-define the radio industry through personalization, but radio is predominantly a leaned-back experience, something one does while driving or cooking at home or working at their desk, and Spotify satisfies a different demand, which is, “I know exactly the song I want to hear right now.”
DB: So Pandora works through the “Music Genome Project.” How does that work?
JS: Every one of the 900,000 songs in our catalogue has been analyzed by a musician and is described across … between 200 to 500 attributes per song. … We’ve been working with it since the company was founded in early 2000, so it’s been long time, but it’s actually a process we’ve been able to scale very well with our own growth, so we analyze more than tens of thousands of songs each month.
DB: You are also musician under the name Jessica Stone. What is it like balancing the performance side while also working on the business side?
JS: Well I like to say that work-life balance is more like a pendulum than a level. The truth is that I’ve done very little with my own music since I came to Pandora, which commands all of my time, but I believe in what Pandora is doing, and it’s helping people connect with music they haven’t heard any other way. It helps other artists like myself who don’t have access to mainstream media to promote their music. We have lots of anecdotal stories where bands tell us their shows are filling up because of Pandora, which is really heartening.
DB: If you could choose one side of the industry, the business or the performance side, for the rest of your life, which one would it be and why?
JS: I think to be in the music industry today means being both a good business person and having a good creative mind. I don’t think you could have one without the other in this day and age.
Email Yan at myan@media.ucla.edu.